


The Camp

by k_n



Series: The Camp [1]
Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-28
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-03 18:51:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,953
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5302850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/k_n/pseuds/k_n
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An international war starts, and the country's first and second generation immigrants haul off to a camp in the middle of the Arizona desert. Kurogane has no intentions of staying put.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. When the world ends

**Author's Note:**

> Copyright © 2016 by k_n
> 
> Hey all! If you've read Black Gold, Black Steel...you're going to recognize a few names in the mix! Another piece in which I can't be certain of the length or update rate, but I hope you enjoy. Leave your thoughts! I love to hear from you all. : )

            He’s been digging at this spot for some time, now. Tomoyo might want to find the key code, but she’s not going to find it within the next year at this rate, and Kurogane knows another solution. No, it isn’t sophisticated. No, it’s not romantic. But it’s practical, and Kurogane thinks himself a pragmatist.

            So in the cold nights, he passes carefully around the shine of spotlights, clinging to the plastic walls of the compound houses—narrow, rectangular buildings made cheaply and quickly. He scoots slowly around the compound, coming to the northern face of the fence, where a shrub has conveniently taken ground in the desert soil. He’s managed to move brush over the hole he’s been digging so that it stays hidden in the daylight hours.

            He is surprised when the soil gives against his hand. It gives in a way it shouldn’t. It gives as if someone else has a hand in the dirt, spreading soil away, as if someone else is attempting an escape. Instinctively, he jolts his hand deeper in, through the gritty earth, and—

            There is another hand, there.

            There is another hand.

            It grabs his. Kurogane forcibly pushes the shrub to the side, heart racing—is it a guard? Who could—

            He sees through the wire fencing. A man. A man about his age, pale-faced and blond and probably looking just as surprised as Kurogane looks, white brows raised high and mouth hanging open. Their hands still clasped, and Kurogane stares into the blue eyes of a perfect stranger from the Russian compound, a man dressed in shabby clothes.

            The man’s eyes are huge, surprised, and—

            Kurogane mouths a greeting.

 

            It starts with badges. Refugees have badges to show where they came from—little tags they had to wear, by law, or they faced deportation. Refugees, and, following that, anyone who wasn’t born in the country. Focus goes to the Japanese and Russians. After Japan and Russia join an alliance, America looks at all its ‘foreign’ children with fear. Badges. More badges. It goes on to second generation immigrants, too, just like Kurogane Suwa. He was born here. He never knew another life. He grew up translating between his parents and other people, living in two worlds at once. The white America, where people laugh at his parents for their stunted and accented English, and the America inside his home, where Japanese is the language of choice.

            But suspicion goes to men like him, too. Women like him. People between those extremes. He is angry because his parents accept their fates, pin their badges onto their clothes with an unfounded obedience to a government that hates them. He is angry because when the badge comes with his name embroidered on it and a number— _a number_ —that he can’t resist, either. He pins the badge on, himself, and glares at the mirror.

            This is an injustice.

            He is not a criminal.

            This is his home, and he has no secrets to sell to the Japanese, to the Russians, to any ‘enemies’ of America. He belongs here. He is just as American as his white peers, isn’t he?

            He pins the badge on his sleeve while his parents sit in their living room, quietly exchanging Japanese phrases of concern and acceptance. Yes, this is life, and no, they have no choice. They must prove that they’re good citizens, good people, or they will be sent back to Japan, a place they left to make a new life, a place where they cannot rebuild. He looks at the number on his badge—his social security number, an emblem, something the state knows by heart. He is not a person anymore. He is a suspected terrorist. He is added to the long list of people who face “random” checks in airports, now, because of his name, his face, his skin, his entire body. He is added to the list of people who are “the enemy”, but he is not an enemy. He isn’t. His parents aren’t. His existence is not a crime.

            The badge on his arm.

            He looks at it until he can’t.

 

            A protest. Kurogane is hiding behind a car with a young black woman who is full of unbridled fury that is beautiful and sad at the same time. The police have tanks. _Tanks._ The protestors have come armed with signs and words, and the police come with tanks and guns and riot shields and pepper spray and tasers. They are tired of being told to be quiet and obey, of being told that the government won’t listen unless they’re well-behaved. But how well behaved can they be, truly, if _this_ is their treatment?

            No one will hire him. He is in debt, defaulting on loans, and his parents’ small restaurant is losing customers, and he has no other choice but to scream in the streets with people like him, people demanding dignity. There is a sizable crowd of people with badges on their arms, and a smaller but vocal crowd of people without those badges, standing in solidarity. They are not persecuted like he is, but some recognize the brutal wrongness of it.

            The woman cannot see, pepper-sprayed and crying and cursing, and he’s holding her to his chest while she coughs and coughs. He has a water bottle and he’ll clear up her eyes as best he can. She doesn’t have a badge on her arm, but she had a sign, and Kurogane had one, too. He’s helped her away from police, tearing hands off her and running when the police shouted _don’t run_ because he can’t listen to them, anymore, when they do not listen to him. The woman was sprayed right in the face for yelling. There was no violence to her actions, though her voice was strong and harsh, and they took that to mean something dangerous.

            His sign is on the ground. The woman won’t be taken away, won’t be forced to live in a cramped camp full of people who use English as a second language—though he doesn’t know he will, yet; he doesn’t know. She has a history, here, and generations before her that lived here, but she is fighting for his rights because she must fight for hers, too, to an audience that won’t hear her.

            People are screaming. This wasn’t supposed to be violent. A kid with a toy gun is shot, and the people are rioting, and he’s behind a car with a woman temporarily blinded, hiding her behind this car. Shops are crowded with civilians like him, afraid to come back outside. Other shops have locked their doors.

            Kurogane yells into his phone, “ _Siri,_ how do you get pepper spray out of your eyes?” and the woman with him laughs darkly at that between coughing. His smartphone gives him instructions, and he tells the woman, “Alright—tilt your head back.”

            “Fucking police,” the woman coughs. “Pepper spraying me—I’ll pepper spray them, fuckers.”

            But she tilts her head back. “Try opening your eyes.”

            She manages to open them into slits. They’re red and teary, looking painful. Kurogane opens a water bottle, holding its cap between his teeth while he holds the woman’s head in place and starts pouring clean water into her eyes. She grimaces, trying hard to keep her eyes open, though they start clamping shut automatically. She has a sign, too, and like his, it’s lost in the street, trampled by police and protestors alike.

            He grimaces. “Start blinking. Keep blinking.”

            “What’s your name?” she rasps.

            “Kurogane.”

            “I’m Shanisa.” She reaches blindly forward, touching his arm. Her fingers roll over the badge, there, and she cringes. “I’m sorry, man. Thanks for this. You got me away from them, right?”

            “Right.”

            “Anyone get you? You alright?”

            “I’m fine.” He tilts her head back again, starts pouring water back into her eyes. “Nobody sprayed me.”

            “A’ight. Good,” she decides. Water is dropping down her cheeks, now, and she’s still suppressing light coughs. “You second generation?”

            “Yeah. Japanese. Parents moved here. I was born here.”

            “Damn. It’s fucked. It’s so fucked,” Shanisa mutters. “I don’t know what’s gonna come next, but we gotta keep protesting. Somebody’s gotta listen. Fucking pepper spray, though.”

            He smiles grimly.

            Neither of them knows what will come next, but both know it won’t be anything good. Kurogane keeps pouring water in her eyes until enough time passes, and Shanisa takes him back to her father’s house, where her three children are boisterous and excited— _you got funny eyes, why they funny, I like them_ —to meet a stranger, and Shanisa’s father is blind but wise enough to know the world is in trouble. Kurogane accepts shelter until the protest dissipates enough that the roads open back up, and he goes back home.

            His mother asks where he was. He lies. She frets over the protests, forbids him from going (never learning that he goes to five protests in total), terrified that he’ll be arrested and that their family will face legal repercussions. They will, but it won’t be for that. But they will.

            Then, Russia declares it has nuclear weapons it will use if the US doesn’t withdraw from its occupation in the Middle East, and Japan does, too, and everything goes to shit before Kurogane can wash the pepper spray from someone else’s eyes ever again.

 

            America bombs Russia.

            America bombs Japan.

            America bombs the world.

            The world retaliates.

 

            Kurogane and his family, and families like his, are ordered out of their homes, ordered into internment camps—prisons, they’re really prisons, no matter what anyone says—and this is history repeating itself, a bad history, a sour history. Russia declares war, and Japan declares war, and children in schools prepare for nuclear fallout, and Kurogane and his family only have three days to pack all their belongings before they’re hauled out to barren Arizona deserts. That’s the only information they’re given. The windows are blacked out, and he can’t see where they are.

            His mother doesn’t cry, and his father doesn’t, but one of the women in their bus—a woman about his age with long, blue-black hair cries into her hands while the woman beside her holds the tears in, cradling the shorter woman’s head against her. There are other buses behind them, full of different people, full of people stolen from unremarkable lives.

            He looks at them both, and they look back. The protective woman nods, serious and tall and strong, so he nods in return. He must be strong, too.

 

            The camp is small and out of date. Kurogane thinks it was built in the late 20th century. It isn’t the same camps he saw in documentaries and photographs—not Poston, not Butte—but seems like it was made just as shoddily. A wire fence around the place—too tall to scale, lined with rolls of barbed wire like curled fringe at the top. Beyond the wires is medium brown sand, pale green bushes—scattered, short tufts and dead, thin branches, stubby cacti. In the far distance, he can see rocky hills, dim and dark against an apathetic, vibrant blue sky.

            As far as Kurogane can see, this is the only place where human life is at all. There is only one paved road, too. This sort of environment does not provide an easy escape, even if the barbed wire and fences weren’t an issue.

            Escape. That is all Kurogane thinks of. His parents are wary, but obedient. They are too old to fight any guards; they are barely strong enough to carry their own luggage, after all.

            There is a locked Wifi network he can’t access, so he goes to the ‘recreational’ camp building to join others around a television, figuring out what the world has done. He has to shoulder his way towards the front, elbowing fellow Japanese immigrants to get there. He glues eyes to the television screen. The volume is not a problem; the people, here, are utterly silent, doing exactly as he does.

            More protests, a campaign launched in Russia that isn’t too wise, as winter has started up and winter has always been bad, there, for war. American troops are invading. Drones dropped. Civilians killed. Russia does not take the hits badly at all, retaliating with shrill force. Ukraine becomes a military base without accepting its newfound occupation, and Kurogane is stuck in a camp in America while the world falls apart. He leaves after the news is over and a sitcom about a middle class family starts, barreling past the crowd and back into the sun.

            They live in cramped quarters with a tiny, industrial bathroom and plain walls and cheap, outdated rugs. Barracks. They have fluorescent lighting on the ceiling, and they all share a single bedroom. Stiff, thin cots with wheels on the bottom. Sheets as soft as brown paper towels on a roll, and just as cozy as that, too. Kurogane helps his parents unpack what they managed to bring, but even that wasn’t much. They only had three days to pack. They’ve left behind a real house with actual furniture to come here, and only have a small amount of clothes, sentimental treasures, and kitchenware they won’t be able to really use. They can’t cook their own food; there isn’t a stove. All meals are had in the mess hall, which is a crammed cafeteria with shitty food.

            Kurogane doesn’t want to unpack. That makes it seem, to him, like they’ll be staying here. He helps his parents do it, but he doesn’t unpack, himself. He unloads his laptop and technology, but nothing more than that. It’s not even useful. The internet isn’t available to him, and his phone won’t pick up a signal. He can’t communicate.

            If he could, he wonders if the world would shout in protest, or celebrate his absence. He wants to think the former, but he can’t help thinking it’s the latter. People are unbothered by things that don’t bother them, and there is a war underfoot.

            There are communal showers. Kurogane is reminded of college, and he doesn’t like it. He washes his hair in the sink in their “house” and looks at his badge. His number, his name, and _Japan_ on it. The badge is red for Japan. For other countries, there are different colors. Russian badges are pale blue. He hasn’t seen any other people; he doesn’t know how many different badges he’ll find.

            When he ventures around, looking at the other barracks, he realizes that communities are formed based on these countries. All people of Japanese ancestry are around him. There is a separation—a chain-linked fence—that forbids them from seeing people from other places. The woman from the bus who cried is sitting outside of her “house”, looking serious and pensive towards the fence. She is around his age, perhaps, but she’s so short that she could be older without him realizing. He pauses before her when they make eye contact. Her eyes are puffy.

            “Hey,” he starts.

            “Hello,” she replies, brittle-voiced. “Nice day out, huh?”

            It isn’t a nice day. It’s early December, dry-aired, and he has a sweatshirt—it’s about fifty degrees Fahrenheit, relatively pleasant. She’s wrapped up in a coat, but she’s still shivering—one of those tiny people who is never comfortable. She smiles dryly. He shrugs; it isn’t a nice day, and they both know it. The weather is not really the question, is it?

            “Who’s on the other side?” he asks, pointing towards the northern fence.

            “Russians,” she says. “We’re segregated.” She points away, to the southern side, to another wall of fencing. “Refugees are that way.” She points to the east. “Chinese that way.” She points to the west, where just beyond the fence is a plot of dry land, and in its distance is another compound altogether. “Middle Easterners. They get their own compound. Other ones, too, I think for Mexicans, but I don’t know enough, yet.”

            Kurogane grimaces. “There a way out of here?”

            Her teeth chatter. “Where would we go? It’s just desert out here.”

            “We gotta escape.”

            “Fighting spirit,” she murmurs. “Hold onto that, okay? We’re gonna need that to survive.”

            Kurogane studies her. She keeps shivering, holding her elbows.

            “I’m Tomoyo,” she says. “Tomoyo Daidouji. Second generation, if you couldn’t tell. I’m with my sister, Kendappa, and I miss my cats.”

            He nods. “Kurogane.”

            “I have two cats,” she rambles. “I don’t know what kind they are, but one is white and the other one’s black, and I really, really, really miss them. I left them with my roommate, and I’m scared she’s going to take them to a shelter. They’re old. No one will adopt them. God, I hope this is over soon. My cats…”

            He can’t think of any answer to that, so he nods again.

            “Sorry,” she says. “It’s just—I knew this would happen, and I’m trying to figure out what to do. I mean, they did this in the ‘40s, way back, and you’d think they learned their lesson. We can’t _all_ be spies. But they did it again, just like I knew they would.”

            He has read his history books. He knows about the internment camps, too. He has no grandparents who stayed there, who could tell him stories, but he supplied his knowledge with memoirs and documentaries. Condescending commentaries by the narrators—that’s what he remembers the most about the documentaries—where narrators said the interned learned valuable trades that benefited them after the internment. Insulting. Ripped out of the fabric of society and told they should like it. Kurogane shakes his head.

            “We’re getting out,” he says. “Don’t you worry.”

            “Be realistic, Kurogane,” Tomoyo reminds him. “We’ll be here for years. I know it.”

            “You don’t know that.”

            “I do. I see things. I have dreams—never mind. You’ll think I’m crazy.” She shakes her head, rubbing her hands together for heat. He already thinks she’s a little crazy, but it seems like she’s going to be his neighbor for the time being, so he’ll make do. It isn’t his place to judge. “It’s gonna be a while, though. Trust me.”

            “So—what, you see the future?”

            She nods. “Is your last name _Suwa_?”

            He blinks dumbly. She smiles.

            “I see things,” she repeats. “Believe me.”

 

            Before he knows it, he’s made a friend. He sneaks out of the barracks at night, clinging to the wall. At night, the spotlights shine from high poles in the alleys between the stout buildings, and security cameras stick under the lights, peering out. It’s a hectic sort of dance he does—he walks very slowly, careful to keep in the black shadows, to slide his way into Tomoyo’s place, where her sister looks stern and polite but doesn’t question it, and he and Tomoyo cook up plans. Tomoyo wants to escape and go to Canada. Kurogane thinks it might be a good plan, but, considering their location, Mexico is closer. Tomoyo is opposed to that plan, as she does not know much Spanish, but she knows a great deal of French.

            Her sister, Kendappa, writes silently in a notebook. Kurogane and Tomoyo are perched on folding chairs by a wall, leaning on a table that’s too short for Kurogane to lean comfortably and just the right height for Tomoyo. Her “home” is identical to Kurogane’s—rectangular, bare, and boring.

            “Ken’s a writer,” Tomoyo supplies. Kendappa doesn’t smile. “You gonna get this one published, this time?”

            “I will publish when it is perfect,” Kendappa replies tightly.

            “See?” Tomoyo murmurs, shrugging. “She’ll never get published. She’s good, too. Really good. Just quiet. Anyway, look at us: even if we _do_ see a taxi, _somehow_ , they’ll just take us right back. I know it. We need to figure out the key code before any of this.”

            Yes, the key code. Kurogane has found the exit, the break in their fence, but it has a digital lock. He shows Tomoyo it during the day, pretending to go on a walk with her while his parents look on, surprised and pleased that he is making friends. He has never made friends easily, and they probably want him to marry her. He’s twenty-four, and Tomoyo is thirty (and doesn’t look it; she looks twenty, really), and she’s a Japanese woman, so they have already approved of the “bride”.

            The thing of it is that Kurogane isn’t particularly fond of women. No. That’s not quite right—he _is_ fond of them, but he has never been attracted to someone on sight. Yes, he recognizes when someone is handsome or pretty or gorgeous, but it never matters until there is something else, there, something between them, a bond, friendship, anything.

            In fact, the first time he fell in love was when his school started a letter-writing program with children abroad, and his pen pal was a Russian boy who wrote strictly about his favorite desserts and cows and the weather. He never saw the boy, but he was thirteen when the program started, and they exchanged seven letters back and forth before the letters stopped being returned. But he fell in love with that child, whoever he was, because the boy had messy, huge writing and bad English that was joyful. He spent a lot of time wondering about how he felt, and he never told anyone.

            Still, he knows that Tomoyo is a cute girl, but he isn’t attracted to her. From what he can tell, she might be slightly crazy, but she is his friend by the nature of things. She’s bright, and she’s here, and she isn’t all that bad.

            “We have ten thousand options to choose from,” he says. It’s a four-digit code, but there are ten numbers on the keypad, and he is nothing if not good with simple math (at least his education helped him retain that bit). Tomoyo rolls her eyes at him. “Way less than a one percent chance we’re getting it right.”

            “There is still a chance,” she replies.

            “Didn’t take you for an optimist.”

            “I’m not,” Tomoyo retorts, “but there _is_ a chance.”

            They’re quiet for a little while, and the only sound in the room comes from the scrub of pencil against paper. Kendappa is chronicling this from the shadows of the room. Tomoyo walks across the short carpet towards a window, yanking the blinds up. Outside, the sky is difficult to see, muted by spotlights around the compound. Tomoyo shakes her head.

            “I haven’t missed the stars in a while,” Tomoyo reflects. “Here I am, missing them now, like a child.”

            Kendappa’s pencil on paper, scribbling loudly. Kurogane swallows.

            “We’ll get out,” he says.

            “Not for a while, Kurogane. Not for a while.”

            “No,” he replies. “We _will._ ”

 

            On the eighth day, he goes to the western side of the fence, clutching the metal in his fingers. He is surprised to see another young man on the Middle Eastern compound side, clutching his part of the fence, staring out with anger and brown skin and green eyes. He’s wrapped up in a thin, military-green jacket and dirty jeans with holes near the knees, as if inviting in the dry breeze. He has a yellow badge on his coat. Kurogane calls, “ _Hey—_ how long you been here?”

            The young man shakes his head. “Two weeks!”

            “Who are you?”

            “Osman—second generation. Afghanistan. I was in the army!” the man calls. Ah. The fury makes sense. Kurogane nods. “Call me Oz!”

            “I’m Kurogane. Why are we separated?”

            Oz might be smiling or cringing. “For ‘domestic security’, dude.”

            “Bullshit.”

            “Exactly! I mean, they’re gonna _make_ us a security threat if they don’t let us out soon,” Oz declares, and he means it. “Japan?”

            “Yeah! Know the wifi password?”

            Oz laughs. “Not for us—it’s for the military around us. They don’t want us talking to the outside world.”

            “This is _illegal_.”

            “Sure as hell is! But I’m working on the password. I dabbled a little with technology—probably why they got me here so quick. Military guys shipped in real early. Afraid we’ll leak secrets.”

            “You know anything?” Kurogane asks.

            Oz glances up at a security camera, black and bald against the stratus-white winter sky. He shrugs, smiling wryly. He might, Kurogane thinks.

            “I’ll work on it,” Oz calls. “How about—let’s see, it’s 3 now—let’s meet up tomorrow, same time. How’s that sound?”

            “Sounds good,” Kurogane decides.

            “Alright. Be careful, man.”

            “You, too.”

            And he returns every single day, repeating the same basic conversation with Oz, learns more about him, shares more about himself. Oz is Muslim; he was dragged out of Iraq to get here; he’s a medic “and a damn good one, too”. Kurogane shares just what is necessary, but it’s obvious that the other man is desperate to talk, to plot, to find a way out, even if he keeps glancing at security cameras. Kurogane is desperate, too.

            When he isn’t plotting with Tomoyo or convening with Oz—a sadly distant thing, too, as a fence separates them, and three yards of dusty ground—Kurogane checks other facilities in the Japanese compound.

            There is a ragtag sort of school, there, and there are two volunteer teachers—an English teacher, a Japanese woman with dyed strawberry blond hair named after a flower, and a history teacher, a Chinese man with darker skin, the woman’s husband. They’re older than Kurogane, but not by much. They aren’t even required to be there; they have no badges on their clothes. Sakura and Syaoran Li. The young Japanese children in the compound are fascinated by their teachers; the older children, on the other hand, look very bored with the entire thing. Sakura was an elementary school teacher, and Syaoran was a middle school teacher; neither knows quite how to talk to older teenagers.

            The people in the compound have made their own fun, somehow. A baseball team, a soccer team. His parents encourage him to coach the latter team, and Kurogane eventually gives in to that demand, though he inadvertently terrifies the younger children with his height and his angry looking face. Tomoyo likes to watch him coach from the sidelines while her sister sits by, writing quietly as kids kick up dust and spray out half-Japanese and English phrases, excited, heads of shiny black hair and happy eyes.

            He’s asked the kids, before, and all of them recite similar stories. _Vacation, Daddy says it’s vacation and we never cry on vacation!_ They have gentle parents who make something light of this horror. No matter how many kids he teaches (badly) to play soccer, this is still a horror.

            At night, he comes up with a plan that Tomoyo does not particular like.

 

            “You can’t just dig,” she scoffs. “That’s…”

            “You said there’s way out of here—not from _our_ compound, not without a _code_ ,” Kurogane replies. “We’re surrounded by other compounds. There might be an exit from there, an easier one.”

            “But—you can’t just _dig_ ,” Tomoyo insists. “That’s just…”

            “What? Not fancy enough for you?”

            “I mean, I kinda hoped you had a cooler plan than _digging_ ,” Tomoyo admits. She glances at her sister. Kendappa, apparently, never sleeps, as she is still awake, writing, absorbed in some other world. Kurogane knows how important words are, but he doesn’t know what to do with them, himself.

            Sometimes, he has beautiful thoughts, but he can never voice them beautifully.

            “Look,” Kurogane starts, “the best solution is the simplest. We’re not gonna guess the passcode anytime soon, but I can sure as hell dig a hole.”

            “What about the guards?” Tomoyo asks, pursing her lips. She folds her arms across her chest. Outside, the stars are clouded out by harsh white spotlights, and Kurogane’s parents have been asleep since 9 PM, older, now, and tired more often than not.

            Still—the guards. She has a point. Kurogane frowns.

            “I’ll avoid them. I avoid them to get _here_ ,” he reminds her. His answer is obvious not satisfying, as Tomoyo only glares a bit. “What?”

            “You’re in the building _next_ to mine. It isn’t exactly a challenge,” she retorts.

            “Same thing in principle. Just takes longer to get there.”

            “Security cameras?” she asks, raising an eyebrow.

            “I’ll avoid them.”

            “How _can_ you?” Tomoyo challenges. “It’s one thing to come here. _That’s_ easy. But _you’re_ suggesting digging a goddamn hole in the ground right in the open. Unless you can prove that it’s foolproof, my reply is a solid ‘no’.”

            “I don’t need your permission, Tomoyo,” Kurogane quips, because he doesn’t. Her glare does not waver, does not flinch.

            “You’re my friend,” she tells him. “I don’t want you getting in trouble. These people don’t care how good your intentions are. They don’t even care about the law, obviously—so they won’t care what they do to _you_ , either, but _I_ do.”

            “Why?”

            Tomoyo looks furious. “We’re in this _together_ , alright? Come up with something better. Show me you can’t get caught. _Then_ I’ll give you the go ahead.”

            Kurogane sits back, eyeing her. “Have any visions about this?”

            “Don’t mock me.”

            “I’m not.”

            Tomoyo hesitates, glancing away.

            “I see a future,” Tomoyo murmurs, “and I don’t care for it.”

            But she won’t explain what she means. No, she won’t.

 

            He starts digging.

 

            His mother falls ill, falls weak, falls on the floor and breaks her hip and Kurogane is running through the compound, screaming for help like his whole world is on fire. The guards go off to find a medic and Kurogane misses his meeting with Oz, that day, because these guards steal his broken mother and leave him with his father to recuperate. His father tries to smile, sometimes, but Kurogane can’t return it. The cots his parents have pushed together look too big and Kurogane badgers guards at every moment possible, inquiring after his mother.

            No one gives him any answers he likes. She’s in a military hospital, but no one can say where. His father, frightened and fragile in his age, cannot scream like Kurogane does, and cannot protect himself like Kurogane does.

            Kurogane assaults a guard because he is angry, angry, angry, and the world cannot soothe him. His fist is answered by a baton’s sharp blows and pepper spray and his face in the sandy ground, arms twisted painfully behind his back.

            They’re arresting him.

            “ _Stop!_ ” Tomoyo is screaming, shrill and panicked. “You’re hurting him! Stop!”

            Kendappa must be writing this. She must be cataloguing, distant, like she always is. Kurogane fights when his wrists meet the metal hold of handcuffs. Arresting him. They’re arresting him. Tomoyo is screaming and his father is standing in their doorway, making sad little groans, afraid to protect his son because his son is disobedient and loud, as he shouldn’t be.

            They put him in a dark place, a quiet place, and there are bars, but he is just as free as he has always been—not at all—ever since they stole him from his life because of his name, his skin, his body, his entire self. It’s cramped, and he only has enough space to stand or lie down, and no one gives him a blanket or any comfort for the night. He does not sleep. He clutches the bars until a guard smacks his hands back, telling him to stay away from the bars. Kurogane has a black eye. Kurogane has fury.

            He does not accept this world.

 

            He is not the only prisoner. There are others. He notices that most of them are like him—young. Mostly other men. Some women, but not as many. He is not allowed to talk to anyone. An officer in beige questions him, and when Kurogane fires back— _my mother was taken, my mother is sick, where is she, what have you done with her_ —the officer is merciful enough to give some details. Yes, a military hospital. Miles off. She’s on lots of pain medication, but should heal well and needs to have more calcium in her diet, though the man does not say when she’s coming back. He does not know, either.

            “She’ll decide,” the officer says. Kurogane hates this answer. “When she’s well enough, she’ll come back—but you can’t _attack_ my soldiers, Mr. Suwa, no matter how you feel. They’re doing as they’re told.”

            “Oh?” Kurogane spits. “And who’s giving the orders?”

            The officer frowns. “The president. Don’t believe for even a second that everyone agrees with it.”

            “Do _you_?”

            The officer doesn’t reply.

 

            Kurogane returns after one night in the “prison”. His father says nothing to him when he returns, but he pats his son on the shoulder. There is nothing they can say to one another. Kurogane accepts this—it is his father’s only way of reaching out, now. It is a type of love, a quiet one. Kurogane nods at his father.

            Due to his “stunt”, he can no longer coach the soccer team. Another man takes his place, and maybe they’ll learn better from someone else, someone who isn’t Kurogane Suwa.

            In the mess hall, where they all eat three times a day, Tomoyo almost drops her tray of bland food to embrace him. They shuffle awkwardly towards a table, squeezing in as best they can. Three hundred displaced Japanese immigrants rumble through the room, loud and cramped and underfed under fluorescent lights, on unfinished floors, on tables made in the 80s. Tomoyo shoves her way towards a table, clearing a spot for her family and his. Kurogane sits beside his father while Tomoyo sits across from them, beside her sister. Tomoyo can barely stop talking. Kurogane notices the curious glint in his father’s eyes. Yes, everyone has already decided that Tomoyo will probably be Kurogane’s wife, and Kurogane finds it rude that no one has asked his own opinion.

            (She’s fine, but he won’t marry her.)

            “You look like…” Tomoyo is about to say ‘shit’, but rephrases, glancing at Kurogane’s father. “You look awful, Kurogane. Are you alright? Did anyone hurt you?”

            Kurogane shrugs. “I’m fine. Just a night in jail.”

            “Oh, right, _just a night in jail_ ,” Tomoyo returns glumly. She dips a spoon in watery mashed potatoes, grimacing at them. “What was it like?”

            “Slept on a wooden bench—or, tried to,” Kurogane replies.

            “Did anyone hurt you?” she presses.

            “ _No_ , nobody hurt me,” Kurogane sighs.

            “How are your eyes?”

            “I got pepper sprayed and punched in the face, Tomoyo. How do you think they are?” he asks.

            “You should not have attacked them,” Kurogane’s father says quietly, solemn, and Kurogane’s stomach drops. Disappointment. But he expects it. He expects that. Kurogane looks down at his tray, at watery mashed potatoes, at lukewarm chicken, at slightly burnt corn and a gritty, Styrofoam cup of black coffee.

            He buries himself in food, in the noise of the other prisoners, and tries to forget the swell of pain in his chest from that.

 

            He keeps digging.

 

            Oz has a password. He mouths it repeatedly from his side of the fence and Kurogane mouths it back to make sure it’s right. Oz nods, satisfied. Kurogane asks, “How?”

            How did he do it? How did he figure it out? Oz only shrugs.

            “It’ll change in forty-six minutes,” Oz replies. “Don’t waste time blogging.”

            “I don’t blog,” Kurogane protests. (He doesn’t.)

            “Forty-five minutes, now,” Oz says, and he goes away, back to his own nest of a compound, so Kurogane plugs in the password on his phone. It works. _It works._ He quickly flocks to his email and sends photographs of the compound to a woman who sheltered him, once—Shanisa with her three children and blind father—and hurriedly types out his message.

            _It’s Kurogane. I’m in Arizona. They took us to a compound. We’re imprisoned—see the barbed wire? We can’t get out. I only accessed the wifi because someone figured out the password, and I don’t have that long. No cellphone signals here. Please tell people what’s happening. This isn’t legal. Hope you’re doing well. Got pepper sprayed a few days back, and that shit hurts. Keep protesting. I’m trying to get out of here, but I don’t know what’s gonna happen._

            He sends it. He checks news outlets, sees destruction in Russia and children with their hair burned off and blisters on their faces, crying in black and white photographs. A draft has been imposed in the US; men and women alike are forced to join the front. Iran attempted bombing the White House, but fighter jets shot the plane down before it could. They’re invading Iran, now, too. Mosques are on fire, synagogues, churches. Children are struggling without parents. Jews are implicated in plots they have no hand in. Everyone is an enemy.

            Shanisa never replies to his message, so he sends the pictures to other people—old college friends. He doesn’t expect anything to happen. He can’t call anyone on his phone; only the wifi is working.

            He goes to Tomoyo and she picks up the wifi, too, and the first thing she does is go on Skype. Kurogane stands behind her laptop when a white cat appears on the screen, looking angry and sour. Tomoyo starts crying instantly.

            “ _Moko!_ ” she cries. “Oh my god, I was so afraid—”

            A red-haired girl with freckles drops onto the screen, teary-eyed with a bowl of ice cream in her hands. Tomoyo just sobs. Another cat comes onto the screen, black and much less pissy in the face. Tomoyo sobs even more.

            “And _Nana!_ Oh my god, oh my god, Carla!”

            “Are you alright?” Carla asks, voice cracking.

            “It’s awful, it’s awful,” Tomoyo weeps. “I’m not even supposed to be on the internet. We got the password, but it’s gonna shit out in a half hour. Carla, they’ve got us in barbed wire fences—oh my god, Carla, it’s worse than I even envisioned—it’s awful, it’s awful!”

            “We’re getting out,” Kurogane adds, clearing his throat. Carla jumps at the sound of his voice, nearly dropping her bowl.

            “Sorry—sorry, this is Kurogane,” Tomoyo explains. “He’s a second generation, too. We’re _segregated!_ We’re all Japanese, here. They won’t let us talk to the other groups. Oh my god, how are my kitties? They look great and I miss them so much!”

            “They miss you, too,” Carla promises. “They keep walking on my head when I’m trying to sleep.”

            Tomoyo manages to laugh, but it quickly goes back to sobbing. It’s relief, Kurogane realizes. Her cats are well. Her roommate has kept them.

            “My cats—oh my god, my cats,” she sobs.

 

            Kurogane digs in the dark. Tomoyo doesn’t know he’s been doing this, enacting this plan, but he is. He knows she would disapprove, but she isn’t his mother. In fact, his mother is still absent, and no one has given him updates. He has tried talking to that officer, finding that officer, but the man is obviously a higher-up that stays behind the scenes. The guard he assaulted always stares him down when they see each other, but Kurogane just stares back. He will not be bullied. He is human; he has dignity.

            He’s digging.

            He’s digging, and he finds another hand in the soil, digging the same hole, and they’re both surprised to see each other. Their hands clutch tight, as if letting go means they’ll disappear. The blond man whispers, “English?”

            Kurogane nods, whispering, “I speak English.”

            The Russian looks relieved, but asks, “Why are you digging this way?”

            “Thought there might be an exit,” Kurogane breathes.

            The man shakes his head. “No. There is none. I thought there might be one in your block.”

            Kurogane grimaces. “There’s one, but there’s a key code we can’t figure out.”

            The man mouths something to himself—“дерьмо́”—shaking his head again. It’s probably a swear, judging by the bite of it. Kurogane glances behind him—he’s still in the clear. This spot is always empty. The guards mostly watch for the door, where the keypad is, but not here, not where there’s a shrub and some broken twigs in the sand.

            “I’m Kurogane,” he whispers. “Who are you?”

            “Fai,” he replies.

            The name is familiar. Kurogane isn’t sure why. He still nods. Fai was looking for an escape here, and Kurogane was looking for an escape _there_. Both of them have been going about this wrong. Kurogane’s hand is squeezed unexpectedly.

            “They beat you?” Fai asks.

            Kurogane’s eye must still be swollen. He has forgotten about it, now. All he has thought of is digging this hole and running from here to freedom. Kurogane shrugs. “I threw the first punch.”

            “Oh.” Fai smiles. “That is delightful.”

            Kurogane smiles, too.

 

            Oz doesn’t show up at the fence again.

            Someone else does.

            A guard.

            He has Oz’s coat—dark green—in his hands. He waves. From his side of the fence, Kurogane shakes the metal in his fingers. He demands answers. He asks where the former medic is, where they’ve taken him. The guard shakes his head, doesn’t reply, and leaves Kurogane screaming into the cold desert until Tomoyo grabs him, pulling him away.

            “I’m sorry, Kurogane, I’m sorry,” she promises, and Kurogane knows exactly what that means. His eyes are burning, and it isn’t from the dry wind.

            “You know what happened?” he demands.

            She has a painful expression, but she doesn’t look away. She holds his shoulders in her small hands, hair blowing blue-black like a bruised sail. Tomoyo swallows, then, and pulls Kurogane towards her, her head jammed into his shoulder. He feels smaller than she does, somehow. His mother is gone, and Oz is gone, too, and Tomoyo _knows._

            “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. We couldn’t have stopped it.”

            “What did he know?” Kurogane croaks.

            “He knew too much,” she says, and Kurogane’s sobs sound young and raw and awful in his ears, but he cannot stop them. People around him, vanishing. He cannot lose anyone else. He can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

 

            His mother dies from an infection. (and)

            His father comes down with a mysterious cold. (and)

            Tomoyo throws up in the mess hall and faints. (and)

            Everyone is sick.

            The recreation center becomes an infirmary, and Sakura and Syaoran become amateur nurses. Kurogane tries to help. Sakura cries often, especially because the children are vomiting and runny-nosed and confused, and Syaoran dumps buckets of sickness into the sand outside, face covered by a surgical mask, sweat on his brow. Kurogane is one of a third that doesn’t get sick. He hoses out the dirty buckets, not particularly pleased with the job, but it’s an appreciated task. Sakura brings the buckets back in, watery-eyed.

            “It’s only the stomach flu,” Kurogane tells her, but it brings her no visible comfort. He doesn’t believe it’s the stomach flu, himself, anyway.

            Aside from that, he goes to his father’s bedside, laying cool cloths on his forehead and refraining from talking about his mother. His father doesn’t know she’s dead, and he doesn’t think that information will help. It won’t make the illness stop. He doesn’t want the old man’s heart to hurt more than it already does, so he talks about other things, about what they’ll do when this is over.

            His chest hurts. People are gone, lost, and he feels he doesn’t have the privacy to grieve his mother, that it isn’t allowed. Not before his father. No, not before him. He must be the strong one.

            “I thought we could have a day on the beach,” Kurogane is saying. His father smiles sleepily, murmuring in Japanese about his childhood days in Japan, about his grandfather, the fisherman, and Kurogane sits by, dutiful and sad.

            His father falls asleep, so Kurogane finds Tomoyo in the center. She’s well enough to sit up and she’s coherent, though exhausted and grey-faced. When she sees him, she smiles. Her sister, Kendappa, is sicklier, yet still trying to write. From a glance, Kurogane can see how poorly her handwriting is coming out. Everyone copes through hell differently. Kendappa, by writing; Tomoyo, by romantic plots; Kurogane, through his hands—fists or digging, fists or digging, either will do.

            “I’ve been dreaming of fire,” Tomoyo relays. “I don’t know if it’s a vision or a nightmare.”

            He doesn’t like that. He smiles grimly, pressing his palm to her forehead. Still too warm. She bats his hand away.

            “It’s fire,” she insists. “There’s a great fire, and people are dying, and I can’t stop it.”

            “Sounds like a nightmare,” Kurogane decides.

            Tomoyo frowns, glancing away. She reaches over, rubbing her sister’s shoulder. Kendappa has fallen asleep, cheek on paper, pencil loosely in hand. The woman doesn’t stir at her sister’s touch.

            “Yes,” Tomoyo murmurs. “The future often sounds that way.”

 

            Fai is at the fence a few days later, and Kurogane is so tired and drained, taking care of the sickly because he has managed to evade the illnesses, himself, and he doesn’t know what to say to the Russian. Fai motions for him to come closer, sharp-eyed, and Kurogane slouches forward. Fai has something in his hand.

            “For you,” Fai whispers.

            He slips something through the squares in the fence, something into Kurogane’s palm. He looks at it, confused. It’s a cookie. A cookie? Kurogane looks back at Fai, expecting an explanation. Fai doesn’t give one. He just smiles, shrugging. He looks striking in the sunlight, golden and bright, like an angel.

            “It isn’t poison,” Fai teases.

            “It’s a cookie,” Kurogane says.

            “It’s a tea cake,” Fai corrects, tilting his head. “Your compound has caught the illness, too.”

            “Are people sick in yours?” Kurogane asks.

            “Yes.” Fai shrugs. “Fifty dead. There will be others.”

            They have lost twelve, so far—the very young and the very old. This “stomach flu” has morphed into something worse, and no matter how many questions Kurogane asks, no matter how many times he shouts, no one will take them to the military hospital. Kurogane is frightened that they _want_ people to die, that they’re just _letting_ it happen.

            “Eat,” Fai says.

            “I think they’re trying to kill us,” Kurogane whispers.

            Fai does not answer that. He looks away.

            “Eat,” Fai repeats.

            Kurogane does.

 

            Kurogane’s father dies.

            Twenty children die. Infants die. The military has finally intervened, but only to take the bodies away. Kurogane throws himself at the soldiers, demanding answers. Where is his mother buried? Where are they taking the corpses? How will their crimes be answered? How will the world react when they see what’s happened? The dead are gone, and no one says where, and Kurogane throws his fists at strangers because it is all he can do while Tomoyo pleads _stop_ and _please_.

            He faces another night in prison. They cover his head with a hood so he can’t see where he’s going, which way the prison is from the compound. It’s not his own compound; it’s another location. This isn’t like the last time—the last time, they just took him to a building in the Japanese compound—so this is something worse. They remove the hood and give him water, but no blanket. His voice joins a chorus of others.

            “They’re killing us!” Kurogane shouts, just as a guard slams his baton across the bars to silence him. Kurogane spits at the guard. He has no parents to impress, to make proud—not any longer. Not anymore. It’s because of this place, because of these people. “No one’s doing _anything!_ We’re all dying and they won’t send us to a hospital!”

            “I know, man!” someone shouts. “It’s killed my brother!”

            “My parents are gone!” Kurogane cries to the dark, because he has never voiced it, before, and it’s a terrible truth. He isn’t even thirty. He’s too young for this, too young, and he can’t even bury them. They deserve better, they deserve a funeral, they deserve _more_ than this. His voice chokes up unexpectedly. Other prisoners start screaming.

            “Where are you taking the bodies?” a woman shrieks, brittle.

            “Where’d you bury my mom?” a man hollers.

            “How will you pay for the deaths on your hands?” another woman demands, and everyone is roaring, shouting, banging on bars while guards slam batons on metal, thundering, and Kurogane’s voice cannot be silent any longer. He remembers Shanisa with her pepper sprayed eyes and cough; he remembers his mother tagging on the red badge to her blouse, somber and defeated; he remembers his father rambling about a happy childhood that smelled like fish; he remembers—

            Kurogane remembers.

 

            They give him an injection, but they won’t say what it is. It’s “just a vaccine”. Kurogane is scared it’s something else, something worse, and he fights so frantically that someone has to strike him in the head until he cooperates. He spits out a tooth, and a needle sinks into his arm. Prisoner. He’s afraid that they’re going to kill him, too, now, just as they killed his parents.

            He doesn’t know if Tomoyo’s okay. If Kendappa is. If Syaoran and Sakura are. Or Fai. Or Fai.

            He dreams that he is a boy in school again, writing letters where a Russian boy writes that cows can have friends and that he thinks they have beautiful eyelashes. For just a few moments, in his sleep, he finds a safe place, and he wants to burrow in, live there, never leave. Stupid, happy letters by a happy child about cows and desserts and how tornados work and _I have never seen a tornado in Russia but I hear there are many in America_ and _have you ever seen one_ and _I wish I could be inside a tornado and ride it around the world_ and it was all so happy and stupid and Kurogane was so happy and stupid, then, and his heart skipped a little to read those damn letters. His parents were happy, then, wary of all things American yet trying to make a life for themselves and their son, and they were proud of him. They were proud.

            He wakes up.

            The dream ends, as all must.

 

            He goes “home”.

            It is totally empty of people, quiet, stagnant and sad. He sits on the cots his parents had pushed together, to sleep next to each other, and hangs his head, slouching with elbows on his knees. A lonely place. The air is so stale. He has no more tears to give, and his arm is swelling, hot, where they stuck him. He is frightened for himself, and angry, too.

            He needs to be angry. It’s the only thing that gives him any energy. It is what keeps him from lying on the floor and thinking he should stay there for the rest of his life.

            Someone knocks on the door.

            “It’s open,” he says, voice sounding hoarse. The door opens with a little screech—if he had grease, he could quiet it—and Tomoyo pokes her head inside. She looks thinner than before, and still too pale. Her coat looks enormous on her.

            “Kurogane,” is what she decides to say, cautiously pulling the door shut behind her. “I have something for you.”

            “Better be the goddamn key code,” Kurogane snaps.

            “It’s not.”

            He considers scolding her, telling her to leave, but she has a little bundle in her hands. Tiny. It’s a cloth tied at the top like a sack. She gives him it, and he takes it, pulling the knot apart. She watches, curious, as he flops tea cakes into his palm. Cookies. From the Russian.

            “He says he’s the chef for his compound,” Tomoyo murmurs. “He thought they might make you happy.”

            “Nothing will make me happy,” he retorts.

            “Well,” she sighs, “he did try.”

            He palms all three into his mouth at once, chewing. He throws the cloth to the ground. It is hard to look threatening with a mouth full of cookies, apparently, because Tomoyo decides to take a seat on a folding chair, sliding off her coat. She’s bonier than before, sharper around the joints. But she must be well. She pulls off her knit hat, holding it on her lap. She is over-covered for the weather, but he knows that she is always cold, anyway.

            “I’m sorry about your father, Kurogane,” she says softly.

            “Did you know?” he asks.

            “Yes.” She frowns. “I saw it.”

            “Why didn’t you tell me?”

            “Nothing would stop it. You would have tried and failed. I couldn’t make you feel more powerless than you would be.” She looks at him with an apology. “I didn’t want to see you in more pain than you’re already in.”

            Kurogane swallows.

            “They gave me something. A shot. Said it was a vaccine. I tried to stop them. It didn’t work.”

            “It was a vaccine,” she replies. “I have one, too.”

            “What if it’s not a vaccine at all?” he asks.

            “Then we are dead on legs,” Tomoyo reasons. “But no—no, it was a vaccine. I saw that, too.”

            “Convenient,” Kurogane mutters.

            “Now tell me why a Russian guy is making you cookies,” Tomoyo says, and her voice takes on a threatening tone that Kurogane doesn’t expect. He blinks at her. “Tell me why you _went digging_ when I told you _not_ to!”

            “You aren’t my master,” Kurogane snarls.

            “ _No_ , I’m _not—_ I’m your _friend_ ,” she snaps, “and you could’ve gotten yourself _killed_!”

            “Good! At least I’ll have _tried_ getting out of here!”

            “Just because I’m not _digging like a moron_ doesn’t mean I’m not trying!”

            “Well that’s what I’m seeing, Tomoyo— _I’m_ the one fucking _doing something_ and getting my ass handed to me while you just ‘see things’ and your _damn_ sister writes in her stupid book—”

            “Don’t you _dare_ talk about Ken—”

            “—and _I’m the one_ going to _prison_ and—”

            “You don’t know shit about what I do—”

            “—and _you’re_ just sitting around like we’re not getting out of here—”

            “ _We’re not getting out!_ ” Tomoyo barks, and the high quality of her voice rings and stings and Kurogane jumps off the cots, storming towards the door. Tomoyo jumps up from the folding chair. “Where are you _going?_ ”

            “Go to hell,” Kurogane spits.

            “You need a coat—”

            He slams the door behind him, stomping into the dust and sand. Beyond the fence lies a flat, beige plain of nothingness, empty roads, no trees, a cactus or two—this is Hell. This must be Hell. His parents are dead and there’s barbed wire around the fences and this is not the freedom his parents wanted for him, was it? He’s a citizen. He wanted to be a police officer, to make a difference, and everything is gone from him, now, and he’s stuck in a terrible limbo for which he has no solution.

            He kicks up sand, a lone man in a barren place.


	2. I will recall, fondly,

            The Pacific is beautiful at dawn, lit pale lilac and soft, promising pink. There are a few joggers peopling the beach as well as a couple attempting to convince their dog that the ocean isn’t so scary (the dog does not believe them). Behind the Daidouji sisters is Los Angeles, tall and spunky and warm. They are young, together, but old with grief. The ocean answers them in crinkling, frothing tides.

            “You think this is a good spot?” Tomoyo asks.

            “Of course it is,” Kendappa replies. “This is the first they ever saw of America, and they were happy, here.”

            Tomoyo holds her mother’s urn against her hip. The dog cautiously approaches its owners, but jumps back, barking when the water slides towards its paws. The couple is giggling, patting their knees as encouragement. There are still white stars overhead, slowly disappearing under the glare of the rising sun.

            “This is where they bade farewell to life in Japan to start anew. Mother was pregnant with me and Father was happy.”

            Tomoyo smiles. Her sister always talks like she’s making poetry up on the spot. It is something people frequently find off-putting, but Tomoyo treasures that. She nods. “They both were. You’re right.”

            Tomoyo unscrews the top. Kendappa, with their father’s urn, does the same. She hesitates, though, to upturn it and dump them out. Tomoyo plunges her hand in, retrieving a fistful of her mother’s ashes. It is an odd thing, to hold a body in her palm. This dust was a woman who reared her as best she could. This woman was the figurehead of sweetness and humor, loving her strange children despite their strangeness.

            Kendappa clears her throat as Tomoyo unfolds her fingers, watching the dust of her mother cloud behind them from the sea breeze.

            She is too young to bury her parents. She is twenty. Her sister is twenty-five. They know they must have an extended family, but there is some controversy between their parents and the rest of the family that the sisters never learned—they never met the others. They do not know who else misses their parents, who else might mourn. They have one another, and that is all. Still, they are too young to plan funerals, and they had puzzled themselves out to the point where this seemed the only feasible option: scattering their parents at sea.

            Kendappa says, “Before we finish—there is something I must say to them. We should say our goodbyes properly.”

            “Alright.”

            Kendappa shuts her eyes.

            “You have shown us beauty and hardship and kindness. Mother—I will always know your laughter. Father—I will always know your strength. I should think there are no daughters luckier than yours. You blessed us with your love, and I will carry it with me, no matter how poorly life treats me.”

            Kendappa’s voice cracks.

            “And I have loved you,” she murmurs. “I have loved you in life, and I will in death, too.”

            Tomoyo’s eyes brim with tears. She turns her mother’s urn upside down and the dust flies about, mixing with the white specks of the beach. Kendappa turns their father’s urn, too, with a somber acceptance on her face. Tears, too. There are tears for both of them, for the parents they’ve lost and the life they face with two crushing absences ahead. (They shouldn’t drive at night in the rain; Tomoyo has said so all her life, and she was unable to stop them, this time.)

            “Goodbye,” Tomoyo tells the bits and flakes that were people, before. She owes them her entire heart. It is a debt she cannot repay. “I’ve loved you, too.”

            The coast is brightening, shining slowly back into life. More joggers round the soft beach in neon shirts, and a car honks from somewhere, and life has restarted, ignorant of the Daidouji sisters’ loss. Tomoyo shuts her mother’s urn.

            Nearby, a dog conquers fear and tramples into the water, leaping into the arms of its happy, proud owners.

 

            Tomoyo sees him, but she is not surprised to see him. The blond-haired man with an old t-shirt and jeans and a little package in his hands, waving at her through the fence. The day is stale and cold; she doesn’t care for this desert, as it bores her, and she’s antsy for freedom. Kurogane is gone, taken back to prison, but that is the only place where she doesn’t have to worry about him getting into serious trouble. He might lose another tooth, might get another shot—but they won’t kill him. No. She knows that.

            The Russian continues waving. She purses her lips, coming towards him, hands on her hips. He has a cigarette behind his ear, which is puzzling in itself, as her own compound doesn’t offer them (but the Russian one, perhaps). He leans in a bit, reminding her of his great height. She knows him from her dreams, and he is a bad omen.

            “Are you waiting for someone?” she asks.

            “Yes,” he replies. He has an accent that makes his English come across rather bluntly, but it is somewhat charming. “It seems you, too, are waiting.”

            “You’re right.”

            “Who might make a pretty woman wait?” the man returns, smiling. Tomoyo glances away. “Is it a lover?”

            “No,” she says. “A friend.”

            “I, too, wait for a friend.”

            She knows which one, of course, but she doesn’t say so. She feigns ignorance, asking, “And who? I might know.”

            “A nice fellow. You might know him.” The man’s grin is playful. “Kurogane Suwa.”

            “Yep,” she replies, nodding. “He’s gotten himself arrested again. I think it’s one of his hobbies, at this point.”

            The man is visibly disappointed. “I suspected, but I hoped to be disproven. He doesn’t take to captivity well, does he?”

            “Do you?”

            “No. I suppose I do not, either,” the man remarks thoughtfully. He wiggles the package—a cloth tied at the top. “I brought him a gift. You might take it to him to help his spirits, yes?”

            She accepts it when he slides it through the grate. It’s light. He smiles at her when she raises it to her nose, inhaling. Something sweet. A dessert? She looks at him, raising an eyebrow.

            “Russian tea cakes,” the man explains. “I’m a chef, here. I took what was left behind for him.”

            “Why?”

            “Because we need any kindness, here, and I thought it might brighten him up,” the man replies cheerfully. “What is your name, Miss?”

            “Tomoyo.”

            “What a beautiful name—I am Fai.”

            “How do you know Kurogane?” she asks, and she’s fishing, and they both know it. Fai rubs his chin, considering. She wonders if he will lie. What she saw of him in the future—he might.

            “It’s amazing what a bit of dirt can do to bring people together,” the man muses—and she knows, immediately, just what he means. Dirt. Digging. Kurogane went digging and met the Russian through that alone. Destiny. Shit. She grimaces, and he laughs. “Nothing untoward, I promise.”

            “I’m trying to keep him out of trouble. You should do the same. No more digging with him, okay?”

            “I think he likes to be in trouble.” Fai’s grin is sweet enough, but Tomoyo dislikes it. “But I cannot promise you much. I want my freedom, too, just as we all do.”

            “No more digging,” she repeats. “Find another place to dig. Keep him out of this. Give him all the cookies you’d like, but _stop_ digging with him.”

            “Any luck on that key code of yours?” he asks, and though his tone is casual, there is something about his face she doesn’t like. He’s mocking her. She glares at him, pocketing the tea cakes. The Russian chuckles.

            “No more digging,” she insists.

            She leaves.

 

            Tomoyo dreams that Kendappa fights her way through reporters and flashing lights, fleeing down wide staircases in the rain while strangers demand answers and Kendappa only answers with silence. But Tomoyo never sees herself in these visions. In fact, she never has—her visions always hold a specific absence of her own presence.

            She knows futures, but not her own.

            Of course, that is the future she needs to know the most about. When she dreams of the camps, she dreams about Kurogane Suwa spitting out a tooth with blood and his hands covered in dark sand and soot, gasoline, flames white with heat—pieces, fragments, of a future that does not look at all kind, and she does not know how to stop it.

            Tomoyo knows, to some extent, how lives around her end. She sees how her parents die when she is five years old in a dream, nearly fifteen years before the vision is realized. Car accident. Rainy night. Headlights with a blue tinge, a car in the wrong lane barreling ahead because the driver is drunk and she feels the way her father flings out his arm towards her mother’s chest, trying to protect her, even if it won’t help them. They die. She cries, but it is not shocking, because she spent over a decade waiting for it to pass.

            Kendappa will die in the sunlight, sitting under a tree while birds talk back and forth and the sky is crisp blue and the air is warm. Tomoyo is not sure when; she can’t see Kendappa’s face, can’t guess how old her sister will be, then. But it will be peaceful. Tomoyo never tells her sister this.

            She knows how Kurogane’s parents die, and when she wakes from that dream, she has a weight in her chest. His father stares at the ceiling of the recreational center, listening to children vomit and grown people cough and a distant television speaking in a language he can only semi-grasp, and it is lonely, so lonely, to die under fluorescent lights so far from home while his son is outside, hosing down buckets of puke, while his wife is somewhere unknown, recovering from a broken hip (he doesn’t know she’s dead, then, but he will learn). Kurogane’s mother dies just as alone and small, feeling like her bones are burning, and all her pain medication does is make her nauseous and exhausted and she misses her precious boy, her precious husband, when she dies.

            Tomoyo thinks of her father’s arm thrust out, trying to stop his wife from flying forward, and the windshield cracks an awful noise while lightning and headlights blind them in their final moments. Tomoyo thinks of that. She rolls onto her side and sees Kendappa sitting on their floor, going through a booklet of old polaroids. Tomoyo smiles at her sister, but she doesn’t feel like smiling.

            “What are you looking at?” Tomoyo asks.

            “The past,” Kendappa says, clipped. She shakes her head. “I am recalling the grass and trees.”

            “Have you written about it?”

            Kendappa frowns. “If I do, I will lose sight of what I must do.”

            “Which is?”

            Kendappa turns the laminated pages, murmuring, “I will tell the world what we’ve seen, Tomoyo, if the world should listen.”

            “Wanna know what I’ve seen?”

            Kendappa glances up. “Go back to sleep.”

            Tomoyo does.

 

            Kurogane might not see it, but Tomoyo really is doing a lot of work. No one really sees it, in fact, but Kendappa—but Kendappa is quiet, almost so quiet that people forget she exists, watching idly by while Tomoyo opens her door at night, leaving trinkets outside it. Every morning, she takes the things back in—anything red, any item she can spot, and she isn’t sure if it’s working at all, but she’s trying. When she isn’t doing that, she’s venturing towards the Chinese camp and hearing repeated words: no, they can’t find the wifi password, either; when that fails, she goes to the refugees’ fence, asking the same, but no one can help her. It is tedious and taking too long, but it’s all she can do.

            Kurogane attacks soldiers, snarls, throws tantrums, and strikes outwards from pain. He only understands violence as the right response to hardship. He’s been conditioned like other men, taught that violence results in change. Because Tomoyo disagrees with that on principle and goes about things in different ways, he’s oblivious that she’s done anything at all. He doesn’t know that rebellion can be silent and peaceful as well as boisterous and painful.

            Kendappa writes.

            Kurogane digs.

            Tomoyo knows he’ll do it the second he brings up the plan, but she is trying to stop a future, and she knows she can’t. He digs. She protests. He hides it from her; he digs, anyway, and when she rightly scolds him for it, he reacts like a child. He slams a door behind him, and she looks out from the window of his door while he kicks up sand and shouts to himself.

            She pities him. She will never tell him that, though. She waits until he seems to have simmered down, but when she tries to speak with him, he ignores her.

            “That’s how it is, then,” Tomoyo complains.

            He silently inspects the outside walls of his own house, so she leaves. Kurogane does not speak to her for a week, in the end, and if she looks outside at night, she sees him hugging walls in shadows, sliding slowly towards the northern fence. He’ll see the Russian, and she knows he will, because she’s seen that.

            There are things Tomoyo can control. She can stop small things. She can divert certain paths. But there are other things—destiny—and she cannot stop them because she has never done so in the past, no matter how she’s tried.

            But she still tries.

           

            Kurogane doesn’t talk about the Russian. It’s an assumed sort of thing, and Tomoyo has lectured the Russian many times, now, to warn him off, to keep him away, because—Kurogane is an innocent, young and fiery, and if she can keep the Russian away, she might be able to save him. Kurogane is just another civilian stuck in hell. It was happenstance that he approached her on their first day, there, and—no, no, it wasn’t. She knows that.

            Destiny is a dirty word. Destiny brought him to her, brought him onto the bus with blackened windows, brought him into the desert, brought him to walk towards her that day. He is not an accident or a coincidence. He is supposed to happen to her, to be another human life she can’t protect.

            The futures she dreams are full of fire and bodies and she cannot see if she survives, if Kurogane survives, if the Russian survives—she knows her sister does, because of the birds and sky and cheerful day—but that is fate, isn’t it? And her visions are not kind enough, precise enough, to give her any comfort. It is much like listening to paragraphs in a novel out of order: she knows things happen, yes, but not when.

            She knew the sickness would come. She doesn’t know if it was planned or just the result of people living in close quarters. But she knew it would come, even if she didn’t know she would fall ill, herself. She saw her sister trying to write under bright lights, sweating and stubborn and refusing to talk to anyone, afraid that if she stopped writing, her heart might stop, too.

            Kendappa will never say that, but Kendappa doesn’t say much to anyone but Tomoyo. It has been that way since their parents died, when Kendappa reacted by retracting while Tomoyo reacted with tearful acceptance—because she knew it would come, and it did, and it could not be stopped.

            Destiny.

            She finds the Russian waiting by the fence, trying to look casual, and she tells him angry words while he smiles on, a human weasel. He keeps digging with Kurogane and keeps ignoring her. If times were different, if the situation was different, if this world was different, she would have—

            It doesn’t matter, though. It doesn’t.

 

            There is a neighborhood boy who makes fun of her eyes, scrunching his own into an exaggerated squint and asking how she can see. Kendappa ignores the child, but Tomoyo doesn’t. She has never been able to sit back idly, even as an adolescent, so she doesn’t. He’s squinting and mocking her parents’ accent when she tells him, “You’ll fall out a tree and go to sleep and never wake up.”

            She’s right. Five years later, it happens. But the day she says that, her parents come out because the little boy is crying hysterically and Tomoyo is sitting calmly, playing with her dolls beside him. Kendappa brings their parents out, having told on her younger sister, and the elder Daidoujis bring Tomoyo back into the house to explain why she shouldn’t say such things. They think she’s a morbid child. They don’t know she can see the future.

            “You’ll fall asleep because it’s raining,” Tomoyo tells them, but they don’t know what she means.

            In school, children do not care for her, even if she’s friendly. She’s written off because she says things that trouble the children. Guidance counselors explain, yet again, why she shouldn’t say these things. But this is not the time of mental health diagnoses. It’s a time of outcast children who never learn what is wrong with them. So Tomoyo is dubbed weird, but nothing more than that.

            When it rains at night, Tomoyo cries until her parents promise they won’t go on a drive. She throws herself in front of them. They’re befuddled and they think she must be afraid of the weather, so they stay inside and comfort their youngest daughter while Kendappa watches on, silently cataloguing everything.

            “You see the future, don’t you?” Kendappa asks, and Tomoyo nods. “Can it be changed?”

            “I don’t know,” Tomoyo replies. She is only eight, and the world is too big for her to control. But she doesn’t tell Kendappa that their parents will die; her older sister only infers it, and when it rains at night, both girls throw tantrums and scream and sob and their parents are confused that the rain should bring their daughters to this.

            The neighbor, the boy who teased them, falls out of a tree, falls asleep, and never wakes up. Tomoyo does not cry for him. Kendappa does not cry for him. They go to the funeral as a courtesy, glancing over the dead body of a ten year old child who fell into a coma he couldn’t break. They hold hands. It is the first time they see what death is, and it’s surrounded by bouquets and hymns and tears. But it would come, and it did, just as she dreamed it.

            Others die, too. When she is in high school, she tries in small ways to thwart it. A football player will get a concussion and later have a fatal brain aneurism. She steals his equipment; he misses the game that might have landed him in that trouble, and Tomoyo is pleased, but the very next game he plays—he’s dead, gone, and Tomoyo realizes she cannot change the path of certain things. Death is the one she can only postpone, but it always finds a way of happening.

            Sometimes, she worries she is its cause.

            She can change other things, though. She can take the place of others. A neighborhood girl, Himawari, will break her arm on a swing set. Tomoyo recognizes the day it should happen and plants herself in the last remaining seat, beating Himawari to it. Himawari never breaks her arm, but Tomoyo does. She takes the wound and she screams—a boy shoves her off, wanting the seat for himself, and her bone snaps when she lands in the mulch. It hurts, but she accepts it. This is the price for changing the future.

            She looks at her parents with grief she can’t show them, broken-boned and morbid but trying. She can put off that drive as long as she lives at home, but she cannot live there, forever, just as she couldn’t steal the football player’s equipment forever, either.

            She goes on. She goes to college, after Kendappa has left. Tomoyo is wrapped up in her sophomore year, suffering with finals, when the dreaded future she predicted comes true, and she beats her fists into pillows when she gets the call. If she had been there, if she had been home…

            There is a night, of course, a night where the rain falls heavily and thunder purrs and lightning dazzles and a drunk man from Britain forgets that he should be on the right side of the road, not the left, and there is a night where Tomoyo does not tell her parents to stay inside because she is not there and Kendappa, too is gone, and there is a night, there is a night, there is a night.

            And for that, she cries.

 

            She only convinces Kurogane to talk to her again because she’s convinced the chef in the camp—a nervous and agitated young man with glasses, Watanuki—that she deserves a drink. Enough flirting can get her most of the things she wants. Watanuki is won over by her small stature and cute face and she smuggles a bottle of vodka back to her home, twisting it open. It’s cheap, of course, but she wasn’t expecting much more than that from the compound. She knocks on Kurogane’s door and he’s eating cookies (the Russian’s trail), glowering at her, until she pulls the bottle out from behind her and wiggles it by the neck at him. It works.

            “How’d you…” He stops himself, shaking his head. “Alright. Come in.”

            “Thought that’d do the trick,” she remarks, and she comes inside, shutting the door behind her. She has a look at his house—the cots remain pressed together, where his parents rolled them, and the sheets haven’t been moved since she last saw them. Kurogane’s own cot, on the other hand, is rolled close to the wall, and the sheets are barely on. The shabby mattress peeks out from the fitted sheet. He’s messy. She doesn’t expect that, at first, because he looks like a man who would be neat.

            He’s staring at her. She smiles.

            “I hope the silent treatment made you feel better,” she says.

            “You pissed me off. If you talked to me, I might have snapped.”

            “I’m not as delicate as you think I am,” she reminds him, but he doesn’t seem to believe her. He’s considering her in his broody way, head tilted back, one eyebrow raised. Everything about his body language screams _grumpy_ and _unimpressed_. She unscrews the cap, and he gets up, going over to his sink. He grabs tiny paper cups meant strictly for mouthwash and brings them in, clearing space off his folding table. Things fall: notes, scribbles, dates, things that show a man’s working mind; he is plotting, too, without her. They sit across from one another. She pours them each what she imagines is a shot and sets the bottle between them.

            It’s only two in the afternoon. Normally, she’d think this is too early to drink, but this isn’t a “normally” situation, anyway.

            He’s about to down the shot in one go, but she stops him.

            “We should toast.”

            Kurogane gives her a rather nasty look. “To _what_? To _health_?”

            “Hmm…” Tomoyo taps her chin with little fingers. “There are good things, still, even if you can’t see them.”

            “Sure.”

            “You’re alive, and I’m alive, and I basically conned a guy into giving me this,” she says, grinning. “All three can be celebrated. Just depends on your viewpoint.”

            “You tricked somebody into this?”

            “Yep!” She bats her eyelashes. “I can be persuasive.”

            “You’re a shitty person.”

            “Then we can toast to that,” she replies, and Kurogane frowns, but they tap their mouthwash cups together and down their shots in a single swallow, each. Tomoyo exhales the burn, pleased. Kurogane is obviously not in a very smiley mood. She refills her cup and Kurogane’s, too, when he looks expectant. “You’re fresh out of college. Know any drinking games? I might need an update.”

            “Drinking games are pointless. Drink to drink.”

            “I figured that was your answer.” She smiles for them both. “How is your Russian boyfriend?”

            “It’s not—”

            “I don’t care who you’re attracted to, Kurogane,” she interrupts, and he only frowns at her, cheeks heating up. She’s hit something. She won’t press it; he is still unhappy with her. “Anyway, I’m told I’m an excellent wingwoman. A guy like you could use one.”

            Kurogane takes his second shot without a wince, and no matter how stoic he tries looking, he still blushes. He thrusts his cup towards her, and she refills it, partially amused but mostly unhappy. The Russian has not listened to her, and Kurogane hasn’t listened to her, either. She expects it, yes, but…

            “I don’t need your help,” he says.

            “Right, since you’re a regular Casanova.”

            “Oh, shut up, Tomoyo.”

            She pours another shot for herself, and it goes down bitterly. Kurogane watches her, eyes dim and brittle.

            “I think I knew him from before,” Kurogane confesses. “His name was familiar, and just how he goes on about certain things. I don’t know. I’m losing my mind.”

            “You’re stir-crazy, bud.”

            Kurogane looks at her like he doesn’t believe her. She pours another shot for them both, smiling even if she feels something awfully grim.

            “My folks are dead,” he says.

            She nods.

            “I don’t know where they are.”

            He looks at her very pointedly, and she knows why. She smiles grimly. “I don’t know where they are, either, Kurogane. I’m sorry.”

            “Some good those visions are, then,” he decides, and he takes his shot while she thinks he’s ungrateful and childish (but she forgives him, she does, because she knows a future full of fire and she is frightened that he won’t emerge and she can never tell him that, never).

            But this is destiny, too.

 

            She sees the Russian by the fence, and she goes to him, shaking the fence in her hands. Fai smiles mildly, unperturbed, while her face goes hot and she snaps, “Stay _away_ from Kurogane!”

            “I do not want to.”

            “He’s an innocent,” she whispers. “He isn’t like we are.”

            “And what are we, Tomoyo?” Fai asks.

            Behind her, other Japanese prisoners are watching, curious that such a small woman should have an outburst. It’s early in the morning, after all, and many people are still asleep. On the Russian side of the compound, no one takes any notice at all. The yelling is an accepted norm, there. Fai lights himself a cigarette, looking particularly amused.

            “You know my meaning,” Tomoyo scolds.

            “Humor me, dear,” Fai teases. “I think you must know something I don’t.”

            “You know _exactly_ what I’m getting at,” she tells him.

            “Oh! Do tell.” He puffs out smoke towards her, and she holds her breath. “I’m a first generation immigrant, a prisoner—a chef, too. I wonder what else you must know about me.”

            She pulls away from the fence.

            “Leave him alone,” she hisses. “You’ll get him killed.”

            The Russian says nothing, of course. But she knows. He knows that she knows. And he will not stop, despite her protests. There must be another way. There must. She can’t stop this, but she can change it.

            At night, she leaves a red ball of yarn outside her door and clasps her hands in the dark. They have all faced the future with different weapons. Kendappa writes. Kurogane digs. And Tomoyo—Tomoyo…

            She prays, now, for another way.

 

            It’s not a vaccine.

            She tells Kurogane it is, but she’s lying. Sometimes, she realizes, lying is all she can do. It barely comforts him, but she holds her tongue, letting him believe her. If he knew what they did to him—what they did to _all_ the prisoners—he would wind up behind different bars. So she withholds.

            But no: it’s not a vaccine.

            The truth is vile.

 

            Kurogane disappears at night. It isn’t every night, but it might as well be—she counts it, and he’s gone four nights of the week. He doesn’t talk about it. He’s hiding it, but Tomoyo knows. There is little she doesn’t.

            She puts out her trinkets after she knows he’s returned, that he won’t come back out. By morning, she brings them back inside, and she looks up at the sky. Taking too long. This is taking too long. She will not be freed anytime soon, not at this rate, unless she resorts to drastic measures. But she would rather not. There are civilians, here. Innocent people. Cute kids with chubby faces who think this is a vacation because they still believe things that older people tell them. Tomoyo can hardly remember what that feels like, but she knows it’s precious, and she doesn’t want to destroy that.

            Kurogane disappears, and during the days, he’s restless yet exhausted. When she visits him, he’s scarcely able to sit still. He fidgets. When her coat falls off the back of its chair, Kurogane jumps from his seat to pick it back up. She notices, too, small things: he’s made his bed. He wasn’t doing that before. But it’s just a small thing, for now, some organization in the four walls where he has any semblance of control.

            He returns to her with notes. She sees Cyrillic next to English on dirty paper with rolled edges—they must be passing notes between the grates in the fence. She smiles at him.

            “What’s this?” she asks.

            “Plans,” Kurogane replies. “Unlike you, I’m making plans.”

            “I’m making plans, too, Kurogane—they just aren’t as stupid as yours,” she replies. She points to the Cyrillic. “Explain.”

            “He wrote things down and told me what they were,” Kurogane replies.

            “Oh?”

            “Yeah, _oh_.” He frowns at her. “I wrote snippets so I’d know what it was, later. He said he could drug his compound with the food—well, the guards. He was making instructions so we could do the same over here.”

            “We aren’t chefs.” She glances at the page, knowing fully well that Fai did not write what Kurogane recites. It is something else entirely. She takes the paper into her hands.

            “No,” he concedes, “but there’s one who likes you.”

            Tomoyo knows what she means, but Watanuki—he’s young, he’s not involved, and he means well. He’s a mess, yappy and starved of attention, but she doesn’t want to do him wrong. Getting booze from him was one thing. Convincing him to drug their compound is another.

            “I’m not doing it.”

            “Then _what_ are you doing?” Kurogane asks. “You tell me you’re planning, but I don’t see it.”

            “You’re planning with the wrong person,” Tomoyo mutters. “The Russian won’t help you.”

            “His name is _Fai_ , and he’s a bigger help than _you_ are.” Kurogane has a sour face. “Look—he’s even written it out.”

            She bites her tongue.

            “He sure did,” she lies.

           

            The school begins again after its truncated start—Sakura and Syaoran break the children into two groups. Sakura takes care of the younger group, while Syaoran takes care of the older one. In the recreation center, children’s drawings hang on a yarn banner. Pictures of the children’s favorite memories. Tomoyo and her sister come to see them, and Tomoyo smiles at the clumsy art. It is what she thinks happiness looks like—crayon pictures. In one, a stick figure family eats ice cream while the tallest stick figure holds an ice cream cone down for a dog (a blob with sticks for legs and a wagging stick of a tail). It’s sweet, simple.

            Vacation.

            The soccer team is revived, too. A man named Shizuka Doumeki takes charge of it, and he reminds her of Kurogane, in some ways: tall and not particularly friendly in the face. But he’s kinder than Kurogane, if less emotional. When the children make errors, he doesn’t berate them, but very logically explains how to correct themselves. The little girls and boys play messily and happily, knocking each other down and cackling or crying, depending on what their parents have deemed appropriate. One child runs into Tomoyo by mistake and calls her _mama_ before realizing his mistake and running back off, blushing.

            She likes to watch them. It’s much better for her soul to watch the soccer games than anything else. The children don’t quite understand what they’re supposed to do. If one child runs, the rest follow. One of the goalkeepers runs away from the goal whenever the ball comes close, giggling while Doumeki reminds her to defend the goal. They’re silly and good and Tomoyo can forget herself for a little while, there.

            She thinks of her cats, sometimes, and Carla. Carla, her younger roommate, the ex-girlfriend of Tomoyo’s ex-girlfriend. They bonded, became friends, and Carla is probably eating something right now. Tomoyo doesn’t think a world war could stop that appetite.

            The sickness has ended, and they’ve all been vaccinated. Or, at least, that is what they’ve been told—but Tomoyo knows what it is. She will not tell anyone. She will lie to them. It is better for their hearts and hopes not to know, anyway. They lost twenty-three in their camp by the time the sickness was over with, and she’s glad that it’s passed. Things go relatively quiet, save for the quiet squeak of Kurogane opening his door at night to go to the fence to meet a Russian man.

            There are things she wants to tell Kurogane, but cannot. It is not her place, nor his to know these things. But she’ll watch the windows to make sure he comes back at night, anyway. She won’t tell him that she knows. She won’t tell him the other things, either.

            She looks back at her sister, who has stopped writing, peering up at the pictures. Tomoyo smiles. “Impressed?”

            “Children are remarkable,” Kendappa decides. “I had forgotten that.”

            Tomoyo nods. “You would have been a good mother.”

            “Perhaps,” Kendappa answers. Tomoyo follows her sister’s eyes towards one picture—two stick figures holding hands, one drawn in red and the other in pale blue. “Tomoyo, there are things you have not told me.”

            “You never want to know my visions.”

            “No, I have not,” Kendappa confirms. She gestures towards the wall, the banner of cheap paper pictures made by happy children. “Our circumstances have changed. This life is different. My choice has changed.”

            Tomoyo swallows.

            “Besides,” Kendappa adds, “I am not only curious about your visions.”

            Tomoyo stares hard at the pictures. Happy children’s visions. Colorful. Bright. Sweetness and clumsiness and everything pleasant. She says, “What else is there to be curious about?”

            “You. What you’re doing. What you _have_ been doing. There are many things you have not told me, but this is the time.”

            “I can’t.”

            “Why not?”

            Tomoyo meets her sister’s dark, bright eyes, smiling sadly. Kendappa, stern and regal and always seeing too much. Kendappa, who stood beside her when their parents went flying towards the sea. Kendappa, who never called her sister “crazy” for knowing the future. This sister of hers.

            “Goddammit,” Tomoyo whispers.

 

            Across the world, the Russians and Japanese meet American troops head-on with gunfire and tanks and missiles and there are thousands upon thousands of corpses lying on both sides, facedown. In an act of desperation, the Americans start burning bodies for warmth. The war is not going well, and the winter cold is an equal-opportunity offender. Soldiers and civilians fall to it. Supply lines are disrupted, and Americans hold their hands around fire, teeth chattering, while old racial slurs roar back into the vernacular. The Japs. The commies. The dune coons. All of it is cruel and confused and scared.

            Refugees flood into neutral countries, praying to be saved. Refugee centers pop up, under-staffed and under-supplied, unable to deal with the masses. America closes its borders to them all, but Mexico and Canada offer their land to the innocents. Still, there is not enough going around, and people treat the refugees like enemies, themselves. None of it is fair, and none of it just.

            West of Russia, Americans hold onto desert lands they don’t rightly own while the British join in, followed by the French, the Canadians, and the Australians. Artillery attacks enemies and civilians all at once, taking down more civilians than enemies. The bloodshed is not ending, the powerful countries continue waving their tanks in the air like idle threats. None of it is idle. All of it is brutal.

            America has already lost 500,000 soldiers. Russia has lost 250,000. They are the main competitors in this great argument, and both are too stubborn to call it quits in the face of great death. American pride forbids the country from surrendering or withdrawing from the Middle East—or, more rightly, American wealth. To lose the Middle East means losing access to easy oil, and the country still prefers highways and pollution to railways and clean energy.

            But in America, Tomoyo sits inside an internment camp, hungry and cold. She is only certain that the future is on fire, but she does not know when, where, or why. But she wishes she did.

           

            Kurogane’s cleaning habits have expanded. Now, she has to leave her shoes outside. She thinks it’s pointless, as there is already sand wedged into the cheap carpet and Kurogane can only clean so much. Still, he’s making his bed. He’s taken to polishing the faucet and toilet (this, she gathers, because she uses it and it stinks of lemon). He polishes his cellphone screen and the glass of his laptop. Useless. Dirt will come back. They’re in the desert and the sand finds it way into everything possible. She is surprised by how much falls out when she brushes her hair.

            Kurogane has papers taped to the wall. He’s popping tea cakes in his mouth like mints when she visits, this time, and he gives her a bland nod as a greeting. She takes off her coat, hanging it on the back of a folding chair, peering at his wall of work. Cyrillic and English. He chews, standing back to admire his work, hands on his hips with his chest pushed out.

            “Progress, huh?” she asks.

            He has stopped going to her for an escape plot. It’s a sore thing for Tomoyo, knowing he trusts the Russian more than he trusts her.

            “Some,” Kurogane decides. He swallows what he’s chewing. “Got the key code?”

            “No.”

            He looks at her over his shoulder, considering her, and nods. He does not tease her any further. “Yeah. Figured. We didn’t have much of a chance, anyway.”

            “Does your plan involve digging?”

            Kurogane smiles dryly, shrugging. He points at a page on the wall, explaining, “Fai says there’s a good spot in the Chinese compound for us to leave from. There’s a corner at the fence that has a lot of good cover—some brush to cover the spot. We’ll dig our way there. Might not need to drug anyone, anyway.”

            The Cyrillic words are not about an escape plan at all. Tomoyo’s heart hurts. This idiot has no idea what the letters actually say, and he’s bought whatever Fai’s sold him. She wants to shake him.

            “That’s nice.”

            “What’s wrong?”

            Perceptive, but he’s perceptive about the wrong things. “Nothing. Tired.”

            “Any visions you wanna tell me about?” he asks.

            “No.”

            “Still dreaming about fire?”

            “Yes.”

            “Well,” he says, and she waits for him to finish his sentence, but he stops there. He starts again. “There was a kid I wrote letters to when I was little—Russian boy. I thought it might be Fai. I know that sounds insane, but I thought it was him. I asked him. Not him. I really thought, though—I did.”

            “I’m sorry,” she tells him.

            “Yeah.” Kurogane frowns. “Me too.”

            They’re quiet.

            “Have any vodka left?” he asks, and she smiles.

 

            Tomoyo is putting out something red on her plywood stoop—a sweater, this time—but stops cold, because there is someone standing right in the dust, shining a blue-tinted flashlight at her. She follows her instincts; she smiles, waving the sweater as if she’s trying to get loose dirt off it. This is a guard. Her gut is rolling, and she is afraid, but she will not let him see that. People who do bad things are afraid when they’re caught, and if she looks at all nervous, she’ll be in more trouble.

            “Oh—good evening,” she chirps.

            “You’re wanted for questioning.”

            “Oh?” she asks. “Why is that?”

            He is not returning her cheer with anything but a bored expression. He shines his flashlight onto the sweater. Tomoyo laughs.

            “It’s dusty. I’m trying to get the dust out.”

            “At 3:30 in the morning?” the guard asks.

            “Look—I don’t sleep well, here. I’m trying to keep busy,” she replies.

            “You’ve been doing this with lots of things,” the man returns flatly. “It’s a sweater this time. Last night, it was a folder. So—yes, questioning. Come along.”

            She smiles, replying through her teeth, “Please let me tell my sister what’s happening.”

            The soldier narrows his eyes, but he nods, telling her to keep the door open. Tomoyo creeps over to her sister’s bed—Kendappa is asleep, for once, and Tomoyo shakes her sister’s shoulder. Kendappa’s eyes snap open, and Tomoyo swallows. She whispers, “I’m sorry. They’re taking me for questioning.”

            “You haven’t seen this,” Kendappa asserts, sounding quite calm, but Tomoyo knows better. She shakes her head. “Be careful. Don’t fight them. Come back.”

            “Keep writing, Ken.”

            Tomoyo squeezes her sister’s shoulder and turns, gathering herself to her full height, head running with possibilities. No, this was not predicted, but she does not predict all things. Tomoyo turns her head before she approaches the door, whispering, “Don’t tell Kurogane.”

            “I won’t.”

            “Be good, Ken. I love you.”

            Kendappa never says it in return, but Kendappa doesn’t say those things, anymore, anyway. Tomoyo walks into the blue accusation of the flashlight, chin up and palms upturned in some indication of surrender. The guard doesn’t cuff her. The guard only nods at her, green-eyed with dark skin, and walks behind her. Tomoyo is afraid, but she is afraid often, even if she doesn’t say as much.

            “Lead the way,” she mutters, “Oz.”

            The guard smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SORRY CHAPTER 3 IS TAKING SOME TIME Y'ALL. I am finishing the end of my semester work and it's taking up a lot of energy. I'm probably about 25% done Chapter 3 as it is and I anticipate finishing it after I finish my school work. Thank you for hanging in there! If you want to see snippets or check what I'm up to, check out [my tumblr!](http://a03-k-n.tumblr.com)


	3. that I was happy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kurogane talks Batman (another thing I don't own), Kendappa hates cookies, and Tomoyo returns.

            Kendappa is no one’s friend.

            Her sister is taken in the night, promising love, and Kendappa cannot return it. She holds her mouth shut, knowing that should she speak, she will say too much. She knows what her sister is, now—what her sister _does_ —and she must be careful with her own words, now, too. She must write of everything except her sister—no, there is more, too, but she dares not think of it. It might not matter; the world may never see her book, but if it does, she cannot have her sister vilified. If Kendappa is vilified? She can handle that. She has handled many things. This is just another difficulty on the road, but the car will start again; it always does.

            Tomoyo goes. Kendappa is left. Kendappa does not sleep for the rest of that night, lingering by the window. She is no fool; she has watched Tomoyo act suspiciously, but Tomoyo is naïve, no matter what the younger sister says of herself. Kendappa shakes her head. Her sister does not return.

            Life goes on, and she wonders if it should, sometimes.

            Tomoyo was a comfort, here. Tomoyo, the younger sister—yet the louder one, the one with premonitions, the one who knew a drive in the rain would kill their parents, the one who broke her arm twice to save another stranger from that pain—a brave girl, but foolish, too. Kendappa admires her sister’s insistence on taking the world’s punishment, but she despises it just as much.

            Knowing the future does not seem helpful if the future can’t be changed, after all.

            In the following afternoon, Kurogane stops by, tired and angry and surly that Tomoyo is not the one answering the door. He asks for the sister who isn’t there, and Kendappa shuts the door on him; she has nothing to tell him. He is not her responsibility, just as he should not be Tomoyo’s She has warned Tomoyo, over and over again, to stop shattering herself for people who would hesitate to take _a paper cut_ for her, but it has never worked. No—Kurogane is not her burden. He is his own. If he should bring ruin upon himself, Kendappa will keep her head down.

            She is not cruel. It is just necessity.

            Kendappa is no one’s friend.

 

            He gives Kurogane cookies, and it’s a stupid thing, but it’s something Kurogane can hold in his hands and actually feel.

            He does not feel much, now; he goes between utterly debilitating numbness and a sharp high in his chest he can’t describe. He tries to stop it. Sometimes he scolds Tomoyo. Sometimes he goes on his hands and knees and tries combing sand out of the carpet. Sometimes he goes into the communal showers first thing in the morning, when the water is still hot and no one is there and he sits under the scalding sting of it. Sometimes he does things that are completely and utterly useless, but feel productive, because that brings him back to that numbness, which is better than feeling.

            He has lost both parents without saying a goodbye. He does not always remember that. He catches himself in the barracks, calling _oi, ma_ or _otōsan_ and has nothing answering him at all. The silence rings between his ears worse than the sound of anything else, and it is more painful than a lost tooth or a surprise vaccine (he’s kept the tooth, though, and he keeps it in his pocket just to look at it).

            Outside, the desert croons a quiet howl. He does not know where his parents are. The nights are unforgivingly cold when he opens his door. He is afraid when he makes the trek to the northern fence, pulse thumping in his head, but he cannot tell anyone. Tomoyo will not forgive this, but she does not know him well, and if her foresight is so good, shouldn’t she stop him? But she doesn’t. No, she doesn’t.

            At the fence, the Russian has treats. They trade battle stories. When Kurogane says he’s lost a tooth to a fist, Fai’s face lights up, and he fishes for something in his pockets.

            “We are the same,” Fai whispers. Through the grate, Fai holds a tooth. Kurogane has to fumble with his fingers to realize what it is, and it almost makes him laugh. Almost.

            “I guess so,” Kurogane decides.

            And he gives Kurogane treats, cookies, desserts, while they dig a deeper hole together, terrified to be discovered yet thriving on this: he is alive in those nights, plotting with the Russian, and there is no one to judge him for that.

 

            He is fifteen. He carefully pins a letter to his bulletin board from a Russian boy, a teenager, who writes what Kurogane’s name looks like in Cyrillic. Kurogane stands on his bed to do it. He’s a tall kid, and people think he’s a man when they see him. He has a man’s deep voice and a man’s big hands, but he still can’t grow facial hair that looks nice or even and it bothers him. His peers grow out full beards for a month while Kurogane rubs his rough chin, willing the hair to grow. It won’t.

            The Russian’s name is like Kurogane’s—his first name, that is, the one teachers mangle on the first day. He corrects them. He doesn’t want his first name, anyway, but his middle one.

            “It’s Kurogane.” And the teachers catch on after some time, though some of his peers still like to purposefully mispronounce their l’s around him, so he never feels assimilated like he should.

            He isn’t unpopular, though. He’s huge and he plays for the football team. His parents are excited and proud of their son, dressing so formally when they come to the games that it’s a source of embarrassment, sometimes. But they mean well. They love him. If he keeps playing well, American schools might offer him a scholarship, and his parents could use the money.

            They own a small restaurant, but it doesn’t give them a luxurious lifestyle. Kurogane doesn’t live the middle class dream of having a television in his bedroom, a dog wiggling at the door to greet him, three cars in the driveway, a nice lawn—he has what he has. He buses at the restaurant on weeknights (when he doesn’t have practice) and smiles to himself when patrons pronounce dishes wrong. It is a small victory, but his alone.

            He stands back, admiring his bulletin board. He likes Yuui’s handwriting; it’s happy and big and he imagines the Russian has a loud voice to go with it. He wonders what the kid looks like, but it doesn’t matter, much, because he likes him. But they’ll never meet. If Kurogane lived in a fairytale land, they’d meet with drama and beauty and dragons would laugh fire to celebrate them. But Kurogane doesn’t live there.

            No, they’ll never meet.

 

            The teachers are married. Kurogane decides, looking at their badge-less clothes, to take a chance: they have freedom he doesn’t. He visits the school—it isn’t a school, it’s a room in the recreation center—and waits, lingering around, fiddling with the tooth in his pocket. When he peers through the narrow window of the door, he sees the room is split—Syaoran with the older children to the left, and Sakura with the younger ones, to the right. The older kids pass notes, frowning (surprising, too—Kurogane wondered if kids still did that). They’re old enough to know this is a bad place, a bad time, and they could not possibly care less about their studies. Kurogane doesn’t blame them.

            Syaoran is attempting to teach, anyway, to a lot of thirteen to eighteen year olds, and his students can barely listen. Sakura, to the right, is having better luck. She’s having them all hold hands. Kurogane tries to read their lips, to see what’s going on, but he can’t tell. Even so, she has a lovely, pink-cheeked face, like her heart is alive and good.

            Kurogane waits. Sakura lets her children go, first, and Kurogane stands back. There are parents coming towards the door, glancing at him with a look he knows well, now—eyes going away too quickly, wary of him, the explosive and strong and parentless son. Kurogane joins the flock, hands in his pockets, taking a seat at one of the low tables on a plastic seat. Sakura takes no notice of him at all, making sure the children take their parents hands before they leave.

            “Be good!” she tells them. A girl with one missing front tooth smiles, chubby-faced and sweet, nodding while her pigtails bob along. Sakura leans in, murmuring something encouraging to the girl’s father. When she finishes, she pats the little girl on the head, nodding—a big smile, too. They’re leaving. The teenagers on the other side of the room keep glancing towards the door, wistful.

            The children _love_ Mrs. Li. Kurogane knows that—when he was still coaching the kids, they lost their minds if she attended a game. One of the children burst into tears when he saw her in the crowd, later explaining that he “just had a lot of feelings” after he sat in the sand and cried (and poor Sakura motioned frantically for him to get back up, but it didn’t help much). Other times, they forgot they were playing soccer at all, running towards wherever she was while Kurogane complained, “No, _no_ —the _ball!_ ”

            But that’s done, now. Another man has taken his place.

            The kids are trickling out, but Kurogane keeps sitting, waiting. The room is depressing, no matter how many pictures they’ve hung up. There’s a printed out map of the world someone’s taped together—all 8.5” by 11” sheets in a rectangle, clinging to the whiteboard by small magnets. A marker sits without its cap. Kurogane sees other markers in the waste bin—dried out, probably. There isn’t enough money here for good markers, apparently. The only technology in the room is what the Lis brought with them—dinged-up laptops and a printer that looks like it was manufactured in the early 2000s.

            Kurogane feels sorry for these kids. While his education wasn’t the best, it was better than this. It was better than these two, well-intentioned, young teachers who are teaching a class of forty. Kurogane grew up with crowded class—thirty-five kids to a classroom—but _at least_ it wasn’t in an internment camp, and _at least_ it was a class of children his own age, his own grade.

            He wonders when books about this will come out. He wonders if anyone will read them. He wonders if, some day, this, too, will become a memorial that no one wants to visit. He scoots his plastic chair against the floor on purpose, and Sakura is seeing the last parent out, all smiles and joy until she turns her head to look at him. Judging from her expression, she’s known he was there all along.

            Kurogane supposes he shouldn’t underestimate her, then. He nods. She nods back, glancing towards her husband’s side of the room, before she approaches. She has a seat at the low table. It’s silly. Both of them are in chairs much too tiny for them, and their knees peek over the table. Sakura pulls a paper from a stack in the middle of the table for herself, handing him one, too, and takes a crayon from a plastic cup in the middle.

            “Hi,” Kurogane starts.

            “I think you’re too old to be a student, Mr. Suwa,” Sakura says gently. She starts drawing, but he can’t tell what it is. She smiles at him, but it’s a cautious look. “How are you?”

            Oh. Right. Of course. Kurogane has two dead parents and he hosed vomit out of buckets. Kurogane’s gotten a reputation, here, for being wild and hot-headed (not that it’s unfounded). Sakura and Syaoran have avoided him since his last arrest, skirting around him the way people do when there’s grief in the room. That thing no one likes to talk about, grief—not for a long while. After the initial tears, people don’t quite know what to do anymore, so no one really knows what to do with Kurogane, now.

            He takes a crayon from the cup, too.

            “Alright, I guess,” he decides.

            “Why are you here?” she asks, but there is nothing unkind in her voice. She takes another crayon from the cup—bright pink, off-brand, not Crayola.

            “Wanted to talk.”

            She’s drawing something. He wants to know what it is, but from the way she’s holding her arm, he can’t see it. “Of course you did, Mr. Suwa. Why else would you be here?”

            He shrugs.

            “You don’t have badges,” he begins.

            She seems to have a sentence in her mouth that she can’t say, grimacing. She nods, lowering her voice with her eyes on her paper, murmuring, “And what do you want us to do?”

            “Don’t know. Just wondered how much freedom you have.”

            “Some,” she admits.

            “Can you leave?”

            “Sometimes—but we have to care for the children, Mr. Suwa, and it is entirely illegal for us to take you out of here.” She isn’t looking at him at all. “You always get into trouble. If they jail you a third time, that’s the last time they’ll do it. They won’t let you out.”

            “Three strikes?” he mutters.

            “Three strikes,” she replies.

            “But you _can_ leave. You _can_ travel.”

            “Yes…”

            “So—you know where we are.”

            “Why don’t you draw something?” she asks. “You’ll feel better. I’ll even hang it up for the kids.”

            “You’re avoiding my question,” Kurogane accuses.

            “Because I’m not allowed to answer it.” She glances over her shoulder, and he follows her eyes. The teenagers are standing up, going towards the door, now—they are old enough that their parents don’t pick them up, and it isn’t like they can really go anywhere. Syaoran has his typical, polite smile, and he’s trying to shake some students’ hands who do not want to shake his. Sakura sighs. “I wish I could. I just… What do you want us to _do_?”

            “Where are my parents’ bodies?” he asks. He’s losing patience, now, but he’s trying not to. Sakura is a nice woman doing a nice thing. She doesn’t have to be here, tending to the kids, but she is. She didn’t have to help the ill, either, but she did. Sakura is not his enemy. But she’s on the enemy’s side, isn’t she?

            “Mr. Suwa,” Sakura says, but she stops herself. She shakes her head.

            “You know, don’t you?”

            “Please stop asking me questions,” Sakura whispers.

            “You have to—”

            “ _Please stop_ ,” she repeats, and he glowers, but he shuts his mouth. She flashes a watery smile. “Why don’t we draw for a little? We should draw.”

            Kurogane obeys, despite himself. But, for himself, he does a bit more. He’s writing Hiragana characters in a badly drawn dragon that the children would probably giggle at. Sakura makes broad, loud sweeps on her page with a pale, pink crayon.

            “I came here because I wanted to help the children,” Sakura says quietly. “I hoped—so badly—that I could make it easier for them—whatever this is.”

            The teenagers have gone. Syaoran stands, an awkward stalk, apparently hesitant to interrupt their conversation. Kurogane doesn’t mind; he talks to too many people, now, anyway.

            He’s startled from his thoughts: she slides the page to him, dropping crayons back into a plastic cup. He glances at it, recognizing Hiragana like his own, and hurriedly finishes his own drawing. His heart hiccups in his chest. He does not expect this—whatever it is—and he croaks, “What is…”

            “What are _you_ drawing?” she counters, smiling as if she has not given him something useful, something fantastic, something that brings the first coughs of a feverish hope back to him. She lowers her voice. “Be natural, Mr. Suwa, for my husband.”

            He whispers, “But can he read the…”

            “No. He speaks it well enough, but he can’t read it.” She looks over her shoulder, smiling at Syaoran. She makes a gesture— _just a moment!_ —as Kurogane slides his paper towards her. The red dragon and characters that Syaoran Li, apparently, cannot read. Sakura turns back, glancing down at Kurogane’s gift. “What is this?”

            Kurogane stretches up from the table, kicking his legs straight—awful, short chairs. He wonders how children can bear to sit in them. He gives Syaoran a curt nod, which is returned with a nervous, polite smile, some fumbled words like ‘hello’ that aren’t ‘hello’. He pockets Sakura’s drawing, folding it, nestling it with a lost tooth. He shakes Syaoran’s hand.

            “Good afternoon, Mr. Suwa,” Syaoran greets him. “What brings you to…”

            “Soccer. Your wife thinks Doumeki’s the better coach,” Kurogane says. “I’m telling her that’s a load of shit. Doumeki can’t draw a dragon like I can.”

            Syaoran blinks. Sakura laughs.

            “No,” she chuckles. “No, he can’t.”

 

            Tomoyo is gone. Kurogane doesn’t know where, and Kendappa won’t tell him. In fact, he has never seen Kendappa interact with another person in the camp at all. She only acknowledges him with nods at best, and even with her sister gone, that hasn’t changed. Actually, it’s worse. She slams the door in his face, and Kurogane sulks around, checking the recreation center. He checks around the fences. He goes to the open square of sand and rocks—the soccer and baseball “field”—but doesn’t find her there, either.

            Instead? Doumeki.

            Doumeki kicking a ball up in the air, hands in his pockets, blank-faced and calm. Children are leaving with their parents. It was a practice; for all Kurogane tries, he can’t stop keeping up to date with what his old team was doing—a gang of tiny children with Japanese and American names, depending on how daring their parents felt when the kids came out. Kurogane strides along towards the man, startled when Doumeki kicks the ball in his direction. Kurogane stops it under his toe.

            “How was practice?”

            He’s trying for small talk, but Kurogane isn’t much good at it. Doumeki eyes him, head tilted, and shrugs. He gestures for Kurogane to roll the ball back, which Kurogane does, gently sending it back. Doumeki picks the ball up, holding it against his hip.

            “How’s prison?” he asks, deadpan.

            Kurogane glares. “It was only twice.”

            Doumeki shrugs.

            “Do you know Tomoyo?” Kurogane tries. “She’s usually here to watch practice. Don’t know. Thought you might have seen her.”

            “I know her.” Doumeki zips up his thermal coat to the neck, starting back towards the buildings, the winding arrangement of barracks they all call home. “She wasn’t here.”

            Kurogane swears under his breath.

            “What about this morning? At breakfast?” he asks.

            “Didn’t see her. Didn’t see _you_ either.” Doumeki gives Kurogane a bland look. “You should leave the Russians alone.”

            “It’s just the one,” Kurogane counters.

            “And you ‘only’ went to prison twice,” Doumeki reminds him, scrunching one index finger in an air quote; the one drums against a sandy soccer ball.

            “It wasn’t _about—_ ”

            “I’m just saying,” Doumeki interrupts, shrugging. “Not my business.”

            Kurogane swallows his aggravation. People know too much of him. He wishes they would stop knowing.

            “When did you last see Tomoyo?”

            “Last night, dinner—but you saw her, too, since you were sitting together.”

            “Where would she have gone? She doesn’t miss meals. It’s not like her.”

            “Don’t know.”

            “…How are the kids?”

            “Goodnight,” Doumeki replies, starting to walk off. Kurogane hurries after him, grabbing a sleeve. Doumeki tugs himself free. “Not tonight, Mr. Suwa. Go home.”

            Kurogane almost goes after him, but something stops him. Doumeki leaves him standing alone in the desert cold, white spotlights shining on a barren place. Children ran about here. Kurogane used to help them. Kurogane used to do a lot of things, but Tomoyo is gone, and no one can help him. Kendappa won’t even speak to him. He has allies—but only one seems willing to listen to him, to plan, and there is a sheet of pocked metal between them.

            He squints, looking up, trying to see stars.

            He can’t see anything.

 

            He holds Fai’s hand before he even sees his face. It’s unusual from the start. Kurogane does not like touching people—it isn’t as if he’s _opposed_ to it, but he doesn’t want someone to get the wrong impression, doesn’t want people coming to him for a comforting hug. He reserves that for special occasions, for special people. Still, he holds Fai’s hand as an instinct, a blind reaction to unexpected fingers. He doesn’t know what to think about it. He doesn’t want to think about it. It means nothing—desperate times, right?

            There is something charming about the Russian. Danger, too. But charming. Fai with those little tea cakes and slightly yellow teeth. He’s handsome in an odd way, blue-eyed, lanky like a noodle might be (Kurogane can’t help but make the comparison). Still, he never sees Fai long enough in the daylight to really tell. When the sun is up, they occasionally see one another through the fence, but never for long. Neither man wants to look suspicious. They decide, mutually, to be strangers in the day.

            It must not be working that well. Tomoyo knows. Somehow, _Doumeki_ knows. Kurogane wonders how many others in the camp walk around, heads full of his secrets. If they know so much, why do people still bring up his parents around him? Their names are in so many mouths— _your father was very funny_ or _I loved your mother, so sad to see her pass_ —that did not know them before this. When he hears their names, some part of him shuts off. No one has to live with their absences like Kurogane does.

            He talks to them. If the Buddhists are right, his parents have probably gone to another cycle, reincarnated, destined to suffer until they find the path through it. But he talks to them, still. When he’s alone in the barracks, he looks at their cold cots, keeping them up to date with any happenings.

            “Tomoyo’s gone. Don’t know where,” he tells them. “I’ll keep you posted. I know you guys liked her. I’m sorry I didn’t like her as much as you wanted, though. Sorry.”

            No one replies, but no one would.

            He goes to his bags—it has been five weeks, and he has not unpacked, and he will _never_ unpack due to sheer stubbornness—and pulls his way towards the bottom, towards a light, wooden cigar box. He takes it out, opening it, and sits on the floor, keeping the thing in his lap. There are memories, here. Pictures. Random things he liked as a kid that must have been magic, back then, but don’t look magic, now. A bottle cap. Pine needles. A plastic sheriff badge. That is the one that makes him grimace, now. He always believed in justice. Now, he’s older, and he doesn’t know if those things exist anymore.

            He retrieves a folded sheet of notebook paper from the bottom. He has other ones like it, all carefully folded, well-worn at the fold-lines from when he had to take the letters off his bulletin board. His father did it, uncomfortable that his son was keeping letters from a Russian boy hanging up like that. If the Russian was a girl? Kurogane doesn’t know. He wonders, though.

            He unfolds it.

 

_Dear Kurogane,_

_Today, I saw a bird and thought it has one leg. It does not! Two legs. It was standing funny. I would draw, but it might take up a lot of space, and I need to tell you the exiting things I see at home! Tell me about your exiting things, too. English is hard. We should all speak Russian!_

_OK. Yesterday, I pretend to be my brother so I can take his science test. Don’t tell! No one knows. My brother pretends to be me so he can cook. We are twins. Mother and Father are confused a lot. It is funny._

_OK. There is a thunderstorm this week. Did you know lightning kills almost 100 people a year? Amazing! Stay inside during thunderstorms so you are safe. If you’re very tall, stay inside even more. I learn about thunderstorms. They are big and loud like a heartbeat. I want to go outside when there is a thunderstorm, but it is not safe._

_I read that earthquakes happen where you live. Have you an earthquake? What is it like? Does it make a noise? Is it scary? Mother says they are scary, but she does not want to talk about it. I want to learn more. The school library does not have enough books for me to learn it and the other library is closed. Do you like reading? We can read together._

_OK. Be well. Goodbye!_

_Sincerely,_

_Yuui Ashura_

            Kurogane reads it over a few more times. There is something very sweet, yet mischievous about it—the “swapping” brothers, the love of dangerous weather, the misspelling of “exciting” (it is a word that, even now, Kurogane thinks is spelled oddly). He wishes he had copies of his own replies. He still thinks about this boy, whoever it was, and wonders if Yuui’s body is another corpse burning to keep soldiers’ hands warm. He had thought—yes, he thought it could be the Russian at the gate, but it isn’t. The name is wrong, and it’s unlikely that they might meet, somehow, in the middle of World War III. Unlikely. Kurogane folds the letter up along its old creases, tucking it back into the cigar box, hiding it in his bag.

            He will keep that safe. It is the only thing he can do.

 

            At the fence, Kurogane tells Fai the good news: Sakura has received the list. More importantly, she has given him something in return. Kurogane is giddy with it all, taking the folded page from his pocket. To the person who is unfamiliar with Hiragana, it looks like a quaint drawing of a cherry blossom tree with random characters and stars. But Kurogane can read it.

            “It’s a map,” he whispers. “We’re in the Sonoran Desert. Yuma is five miles west. Gila River’s about two miles south.”

            “Mrs. Li must be very nice,” Fai decides. He frowns. “This is dangerous.”

            “She took the list. That’s a good sign.”

            “Do you trust her?”

            “Yes. She isn’t bad.”

            Fai doesn’t seem convinced. A brief silence forms between the men, and Kurogane puts the map back into his pocket. He won’t let go of that map—not for anything. It might be the only thing he has left after this. He doesn’t know, though. How could he? Fai dips down, sliding his arms beneath the hole in the fence and wiggling, back against the sand. He can fit his arms through, but not his head.

            “We must keep digging, yes?” Fai sighs, slipping back out again. He wipes sand off his arms while Kurogane nods. “As I thought.”

            Kurogane palms the earth out. So far, he has hidden the misplaced dirt wherever possible. Sometimes, he has pockets full of dirt, which he turns inside out as he makes the terrifying trek back to the barracks. Usually, though, he just shoves dirt under the dead brush. No one has caught on so far, but they have not made much progress with the hole.

            “You do not talk about yourself,” Fai murmurs. He pulls sand from his side.

            Kurogane smiles grimly. “What’s there to say?”

            “What was your life like—before this?”

            “Better. Sort of. Yours?”

            “Ah—better, sort of,” Fai decides. He has a quick smile. “We are the same.”

            “You like saying that.”

            “People are often more similar than they should like to admit,” Fai muses. “Yes, it was better, but in a ‘sort of’ way.”

            “Less talking. More digging.”

            “I can multi-task,” Fai replies. “What were your hobbies?”

            “Don’t know,” Kurogane mutters. “Comics. Loved comics. Still do—just isn’t the same, I guess.”

            “Comics?”

            “Do you know Batman?”

            “Honestly, Kurogane,” Fai huffs, “what sort of question…”

            “I don’t know what it’s like in Russia!”

            “Did you think we all spent our time looking at goats? Did you think Russian children did not have any entertainment? American media is a worldwide industry, Kurogane—so: yes, I know the Batman.”

            Kurogane hears something he shouldn’t—a whisper of feet—and jerks his hands right out of the hole, shoving sand behind the brush. Fai leaps up immediately, checking behind himself—there are no soldiers on the Russian side, no guards, no security in his area—and mouths _run_. Kurogane does not have time to say goodbye. He looks behind him—a guard in the distance, walking the opposite way, facing the opposite way—and bolts to the nearest building, pushing against it.

            He is angry at Batman for distracting him. Stupid.

            His pulse in his ears. _Thud thud thud._ The annoying complaint of the beating heart and running blood. He slides, rounding a corner. The guards are never around here, never, but there is the one…

            He checks over the corner. The man is starting to turn around. Kurogane, thinking quickly, hurries to the plywood stoop of this unused building—an elderly couple lived here, an elderly couple that died like so many have from that awful plague. He gets on his knees, crouching under it, making himself as small as possible.

            He loved hiding as a child. This is a bastardization of the old game.

            Whispering footsteps.

            Kurogane holds his breath.

            The guard strides calmly towards the fence, towards the brush. He takes out a flashlight, shining a blue-white light directly at the spot where Kurogane and Fai have been digging. Kurogane’s heart screams. The guard bends over, plucking something from the ground. He blows on it.

            It’s Kurogane’s tooth, the one on his bottom row, the one that was punched straight out. Kurogane can’t breath.

            The guard turns the tooth in his hand, squinting at it. But he stops looking at the spot, the spot where the hole is, the spot where Kurogane and Fai met. If the guard just moved the brush an inch, he would see the hole. He would figured it out. But the guard doesn’t do that. He just looks at the tooth, curious, before shining his flashlight around, turning. He doesn’t shine the light on the stoop. He isn’t looking there at all.

            Thud thud thud.

            The guard shrugs. He tosses the tooth behind him, walking back into the dark, and Kurogane doesn’t know how much time passes before he moves again. He doesn’t know. But he’s terrified. He is.

            Fucking Batman.

 

            He goes to Tomoyo’s place—Kendappa’s, now, maybe, since Tomoyo has been missing for two days and no one is saying anything about it—and knocks. Kendappa says and does nothing. Kurogane knocks again. Silence replies. Kurogane knocks even harder.

            “Oi. I know you’re in there.”

            He waits. Nothing.

            “I just wanna know where she is. Can you let me in?”

            Still, nothing.

            “I swear to God—I’m gonna kick your door in, Kendappa, if you don’t stop writing for _one_ goddamn second to open up.”

            Nothing, surprisingly.

            Kurogane clears his throat.

            “I have cookies?” he tries.

            Like magic, the door opens! Kendappa gives him a cursory glance, lips pursed, and blocks his way. She has avoided him in the mess hall, sitting in crowded places where he can’t join her, and she looks as if she’d rather return to that. Of course, most people in the camp would rather avoid him, and he knows that.

            “Do you even talk?” Kurogane asks.

            She steps back, gesturing him inside. She shuts the door after he comes in. The place doesn’t look any different. He sees a mostly-finished bottle of vodka next to Tomoyo’s cot, and an opened notebook beside Kendappa’s. He takes off his shoes by the door and ruffles sand from his hair.

            “Thanks,” he says.

            Kendappa takes a seat where she typically has, in the past, when Kurogane planned with Tomoyo. It seems like a long time ago. It sort of is. He hasn’t planned with her in two weeks, which he knows only because he has kept track of his time, here. Kendappa, by the window, in the corner of the room. The blinds are drawn shut. The room is uncomfortably dark, like a peek inside a cloud at night.

            “You know where she is, don’t you?” he asks.

            She looks at the blinds.

            “Do you just not talk to anyone? Is that a thing?” he sighs.

            “I talk to my sister,” Kendappa replies, and he’s actually very surprised that she answers at all. But she’s right. “My sister is not here.”

            “Where, then?”

            She flashes him a caustic look. “My sister is causing trouble. I do not know if she’ll come back.”

            “Trouble?”

            “I recall you having cookies, and I am starting to think you don’t,” Kendappa warns. It makes Kurogane smile, even if her delivery is cold, sterile. He takes out a napkin sack and crosses the room, delivering it. She unties the sack with pale fingers. “Ah. Tea cakes.”

            “You’re welcome.”

            “Thank you,” she belatedly returns. She pops one in, chewing, delivering an unwavering and uncomfortable stare. Kurogane turns on a lamp, suddenly more aware of the dark than before, and the yellow light brings just a dash of comfort. “I have had better. Tell the chef my complaints.”

            “That’s pretty rude. He’s a nice guy.”

            “You are alone in that opinion.”

            She does not smile. Kurogane feels as if that should be a joke, but it isn’t, evidently; she ties the napkin sack shut and drifts across the room, picking up her notebook. She sits at the edge of her cot. Uncertain what else to do with himself, Kurogane takes her seat by the window.

            “His name is Fai.”

            She’s writing.

            “He’s nice.”

            “Keep away from him.”

            “ _Why_? Tomoyo said it, too—”

            “And you haven’t listened,” Kendappa interrupts sharply. “My sister had visions. If she told you to do something, you were meant to do it.”

            “But what is it about _Fai_?”

            “I don’t pretend to understand it,” Kendappa mutters, “but I respect her, and I respect her wishes. She wanted you to keep away from him.”

            “Stop it.”

            She tilts her head.

            “Past tense. She’s alive. Don’t talk like she’s dead,” Kurogane says, clearing his throat. Pain. Guilt. He has to be hopeful, somehow. “It’s been two days.”

            “We do not know if she survived,” Kendappa decides. “I prefer to assume the worst. When I am wrong, it is pleasing, and when I am right, I am not surprised. High hopes can only be detrimental.”

            “You’re really lifting my spirits.”

            “How you feel is not my concern. She was my sister. She was only your friend, if that.”

            “Fuck you.”

            “Such a way with words,” Kendappa mumbles.

            Kurogane realizes that he would rather talk to his dead parents than Kendappa Daidouji. He swallows against the sound of the woman’s writing; she does not look at him, now. The vodka near Tomoyo’s cot gives him a hopeful, lonely smile, like a kind and painful memory.

            “She was causing trouble,” he starts. “What do you mean?”

            “I’m dismissing you, Mr. Suwa. This is your cue to leave,” Kendappa replies, and she looks at him, then, with hard, stern eyes. He fires back his own glare, but not before he grabs the vodka bottle.

            “Go to hell, Kendappa,” he snarls.

            But she does not reply. He stomps back into his shoes and slams the door behind him. She can go to hell. She’s evasive. She’s pessimistic. She sits in the dark like a—he doesn’t know what, but it’s unsettling, and he nearly wishes she had decided to ignore him, this time, too.

            He knows something, though.

            Trouble.

            Tomoyo always said she was doing something—something that could help them escape—yet never explained just what. But it must have been enough. She has not disappeared for no reason, after all. But what? What did she do?

  
            He comes back to his empty barracks and unscrews the cap.

            Today, he drinks alone.

 

            In Russia, American troops are pulling back south. Over five thousand have been taken prisoner, and there is a frantic dance of politics and rhetoric and propaganda. The American public wants the war to be won, and quickly. The American public asks why they cannot drop another atomic bomb and see this awful thing finished. But the American public says that with such ease because war has not ruffled their soil—a civil war, yes, but not an international one.

            The United Nations imposes brutal sanctions, favoring the United States’ side—the Allies, once more, but the ambassadors are finding it hard to fly in for meetings amidst the chaos. Norway and Denmark and Sweden maintain neutrality and refuse to let either side cross through to ship war machines and ammunition. Thus, in Russia, soldiers die, and soldiers are taken prisoner. Drones over Russian skies are shot down faster than the drones can be remade, and the war does not look good for the Americans, but, at home, the Americans refuse to believe it.

            The American president meets with the British prime minister. The media recounts the announcements soberly, but still find a free minute by which to mock both leaders’ appearances. Some people laugh along, and some don’t.

            Mexico, Canada, and Australia see an influx of a million refugees. The camps are over-crowded and the people are cold, hungry, frightened, even if the people greet them in airports with signs of welcome. A Syrian family cries with painful gratitude when a Mexican family comes to theirs, and their children dance together. The media loves this moment, and people tweet and blog about it, claiming their faith in humanity is restored.

            In Novosibirsk, Russia, a city bombed beyond recognition, survivors freeze to death. Some cling to that old faith in humanity. Others cannot. The survivors that don’t fall victim to the cold huddle in shattered building foundations around barrel fires, watching escaped animals from the zoo climb over the rubble. A white tiger takes pause, meeting the eyes of two women who holds their palms close to the fire, women who have lost hope of a helicopter rescue. The tiger bounds towards them; one woman screams, and the other tries to shield her, but the tiger only curls close to the fire barrel. The cold is nothing, if not unprejudiced: all species feel it.

            The woman who screamed holds one hand to her mouth, drawing towards the beast. The other woman tries to pull her back, but cannot stop her companion: the woman throws one of their blankets on the animal, realizing that they are all cold, here, and that her life is not more inherently valuable than the tiger’s—it deserves comfort, too.

            But no one captures this moment. This will not spread like fever across the internet. The women will die, nameless, like so many other civilians. Their names will not be in the history books, and the tiger, too, will be an anonymous casualty.

            But that is war.

 

            “Not enough, yet,” Kurogane whispers. Fai is wiggling under the fence; he can push himself only to the top of his nose. The hole isn’t deep enough, but Kurogane kneels, looking down at the top half of the Russian’s face. Fai presses down on his nose, trying to wiggle even further, but it doesn’t work. Fai lies still for a few moments, then, looking up at his Japanese companion.

            “Your eyes look red in the dark,” Fai remarks.

            “They’re brown.”

            “They look red,” Fai repeats. “It must be the moonlight, yes?”

            Kurogane frowns. The night is dim, and the moon curls in a slim crescent above them. The light is poor, but it is better this way; it is better for the visibility to be bad, anyway, so that the guards have even less a chance of seeing them.

            “We need to keep digging,” he mumbles. He taps Fai on the forehead. “Slide back under.”

            “You are no fun, Kurogane,” Fai sighs, but he obeys, sliding back into his own side. He shakes out his hair like a dog and Kurogane covers his eyes, wary of the spit of sand. Fai has gotten sand in his eyes before, after all, and it’s an unpleasant thing. He drops his hands once he hears Fai digging once more. “No news on your girlfriend, then, I presume?”

            “She isn’t my girlfriend,” Kurogane grunts. “But—nothing.”

            It has been three days. Tomoyo remains missing. Kendappa remains cruel. Everyone remains unhelpful.

            “What do you think she did?” Fai wonders.

            “Don’t know. Her sister said she was causing ‘trouble’. That woman’s like the riddle sphinx.”

            Fai smiles. “Well, perhaps she is afraid.”

            “But why won’t she tell _me_?”

            “Ah…” Fai scratches his nose, glancing behind him. Nothing. They are safe. But Kurogane’s ears are more sensitive than before, now that he knows they could be caught. It was pure luck that that guard hadn’t found the hole. “Why do you think?”

            “I don’t know, Fai. People aren’t my area.”

            “What is?”

            “Batman.”

            Fai smiles, shaking his head. Their digging hands meet, briefly, but neither man makes a fuss about it; neither man laughs uncomfortably, moving away. There is something comfortable, Kurogane thinks, about the Russian, but he doesn’t know what. He allows the feeling, here, because Fai is kind enough not to judge him.

            “Kendappa didn’t like your cookies, by the way,” Kurogane recalls. “She said to ‘send her complaints’.”

            “That isn’t very kind of her.”

            “She doesn’t seem really kind.”

            “No. Guess not.”

            Fai reaches through, grasping Kurogane’s hand. Kurogane, a man who doesn’t particularly like contact, allows it. He squints at Fai; in the dark, Fai looks blue and grey, like oily ice. But beautiful, too.

            “I would be careful with Tomoyo,” Fai says quietly.

            “Why?”

            “I worry which side she is on,” Fai replies. “I do not want you in more trouble. You were arrested twice, and if it happens again, I will not see you. I don’t want that.”

            “Why?”

            “Because I will not have a friend to tease,” Fai remarks, smiling. He releases the hand. “If she comes back, be cautious. Her sister acts suspiciously, and there must be a reason, even if you haven’t found it.”

            “What do _you_ think, though?”

            “I don’t know what I think,” Fai decides. “Lately, I have been thinking about sandstorms. I would like to see one. I have never seen one.”

            “Well, I don’t think they’re gonna be as amazing as you’d imagine. Probably a lot of sand. Wind. Mostly sand, though.”

            “You have no imagination,” Fai complains. “I’m certain they’re beautiful. Weather is a beautiful thing. I miss the rain, here, and I miss the cold.”

            “You don’t think this is cold?”

            It’s only a little over 40, but Kurogane will admit that he’s cold—not aloud, of course, but he really is cold. Fai covers his mouth to mute a breathy laugh.

            “It’s not the same,” Fai replies. “There is no snow. I can feel my face. This is not what I would call cold.”

            “How long ago did you leave Russia?”

            “Ah… A few years. I am a recent immigrant. I was still applying for citizenship when this occurred—but they did not send me back. They are afraid I have secrets, perhaps, that Russia might want.”

            Kurogane hears something in that voice, but he isn’t sure what it is.

            “Do you?”

            “Some secrets,” Fai confesses. “Not helpful for Russia, of course—only detrimental to me, really, as secrets are.”

            Kurogane waits.

            “I’m gay, Kurogane.”

            “Oh.”

            That isn’t really a revelation. Kurogane suspected as much, but came to the conclusion that it wasn’t his business, anyway, just as his own sexuality is no one else’s business.

            “That is why I left Russia.”

            “Pretty good reason.”

            “Does it bother you?”

            “No.”

            “Are you?”

            “No.”

            “What are you?”

            “Batman.”

            “Kurogane.”

            “Fai.”

            “You are so difficult,” Fai muses. He pauses. “Ah—a tooth?” He sifts through the sand in his palm. “Yes, a tooth.”

            “Oi—that’s mine.”

            “You shouldn’t keep leaving your teeth everywhere,” Fai says. “How irresponsible…”

            “Aw, shut up. Give it here.”

            “I’m going to keep it, though I think I have given you better gifts. I bring you sweets and you bring me a tooth. I’ll accept it, though.”

            “But I didn’t give you my tooth.”

            “Technicalities, Kurogane. Thank you for the gift.”

            Kurogane smiles.

            “Bastard,” he whispers.

 

            The room is small with a one-way mirror—on the other side, strangers stand by, watching. But all Tomoyo sees is her own reflection and Oz’s. They are kind enough not to handcuff her, kind enough to let her sit like a dignified person. She folds her hands on the grey table, sitting under irritating, fluorescent lights. Oz has a clipboard and a pen, green eyes watching her seriously, but without malice.

            “You’ve been leaving red items outside your door,” Oz starts. “I want to know why.”

            “I don’t know what you mean.” Tomoyo smiles at him.

            “Are you a Communist?”

            “No, but thank you, McCarthy,” Tomoyo replies. “Communism isn’t a crime, anymore, unless I just woke up in the 1950s, which I don’t think happened.”

            Oz smiles wryly, shrugging.

            “Why are you leaving them?”

            “I’m told I sleepwalk.”

            “You’ve never seen a doctor for it,” Oz replies. He taps the capped end of his pen on the clipboard. “You majored in Russian in college. Sort of a weird thing to do, isn’t it?”

            “I almost majored in French, as well, but you don’t seem to think _that_ is weird.” She glances towards the mirror, wondering if she is meeting someone’s eyes behind it. “Am I _really_ being questioned because I like the color red?”

            “Miss Daidouji,” Oz retorts, “don’t be naïve.”

            She meets his eyes, raising an eyebrow. “Then _question_ me.”

            Oz unsnaps something from the clipboard and slides it across the table. A photograph. A man with blond hair, a slightly crooked nose, blue eyes, and a yellowish smile. She knows this face. This is a mugshot. “What about him?”

            “Do you know this man?”

            “He’s a chef for the Russian compound. Annoying guy,” she replies. “Fai Fluorite.”

            “No,” Oz says. “This is his brother.”

            “Then I don’t know him.” She shrugs. “Should I?”

            “He’s a Russian spy. I thought you would.”

            “I’m not a spy, Oz,” she sighs. “I’m a civilian.”

            “Most civilians leave red things outside their doors for spy satellites to see, then, huh?” Oz asks. Tomoyo shakes her head. “Look—I know what you are. We all know what you are.”

            “Then what is the point?” she quips. “Arrest me.”

            “You see, that’s one of your choices, but not the only one,” Oz explains. “Someone else is using the wifi in your compound. You know that shouldn’t be possible. But this person knows the passwords and keeps connecting.”

            “You’re the one who gave us the first password,” she reminds him, glaring. “I know you were testing us.”

            “Caught me.” Oz smiles. “There’s another spy in your compound. Find out who, and you never have to go to prison.”

            “This is already a prison,” Tomoyo snaps. “These are innocent people. These people are not a danger to the public—I think it’s people like _you_ who are.”

            “It’s war, man,” Oz grumbles. “Do _you_ think I like it? No, I don’t, but there’s a war going on, and this is what we have to do.”

            Tomoyo narrows her eyes. She knows what he’s doing. He’s trying to appeal to her, to become friendly with her, so that she might tell him the things she knows, the things she’s done. She props her chin on her palm, smiling.

            “You want my help in finding the other spy,” she says.

            “Bingo.”

            “If I find them, I’m off the hook.”

            “You got it.”

            “And if I don’t find them?”

            Oz pantomimes holding bars in his fists, like a prisoner staring outside his cell. Tomoyo laughs dryly.

            “You’re real charming,” she tells him.

            “Will you do it?”

            “It doesn’t look like I have a better option,” she muses. “Guess I have to.”

            “Atta girl.”

            “No,” she returns. “I’m _ma’am_ to you, from now on.” She pauses, considering. “Can I request something?”

            “I don’t know. Try me.”

            “Wine,” she says. “I want wine.”

            “Get the spy, get the wine.”

            “Alright,” she murmurs. “I’ll need all the information you have on this other spy, then. Details. IP addresses. Give me that, and I’ll tell you what I know.”

            Oz sits back, nodding.

            Tomoyo will spend three days away from the Japanese compound, going over files, taking note of any patterns—they can’t find the actual messages sent, but they can tell the person has used an email address, though everything is coded (she knows the code, yes, but she doesn’t let on, thinking it best to keep quiet if it might benefit her). She will spend three days away and come back, eyes alert, hiding a microphone wired beneath her shirt, wondering who else is doing exactly what she is.

            She returns to her barracks, opening the door. Kendappa, by the window, writing, looks up.

            “Guess who didn’t die?” Tomoyo asks.

            “I don’t have to guess,” Kendappa replies. She nearly smiles, but not quite. “Welcome back, Tomoyo.”


	4. because I was with you.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There may or not be explosions, some people go missing, some people come back, and let's just hope nobody loses an arm.

            Tomoyo does not know who the spy was in the Japanese compound. She doesn’t. She can’t figure it out. The IP address frequently changes and she can never figure out why or how. This is her business to know. She has inklings, yes, but does not expect this. This is precisely the option she never realized was there in the first place. Later, of course—later. She will think of this later.

            When the truck brings her back to the compound, she has the distinct, terrified feeling of the future coming true. The black sky with its muted stars, the distant mountains, the hiss of a rattlesnake, the spotlights blaring hot and clinical. Oz sits beside her, raising an eyebrow, and she can’t breathe.

            Fire, blood, fire, blood.

            “Hey,” Oz mutters, “what is it?”

            “Stop the truck,” Tomoyo whispers, choking for the words. She can’t blink. If she blinks, she’ll miss it. She can’t. Oz tilts his head. He isn’t getting it. These people aren’t getting it. If they stop the truck—if they _stop the truck,_ then maybe, just maybe, she’ll survive.

            But maybe she is not supposed to. Maybe this is the future. Maybe this is where her future ends, sitting in a truck with a man who found her out and was practical enough to make that useful for himself. Maybe this is the end, for her, away from her sister, away from her friends, away from her cats, away from red-haired Carla, away from a good life that she’s had between coded emails to her Russian supervisor and meetings in coffee houses and years spent unlearning her accent and—

            Maybe this is how it ends.

            The driver doesn’t stop the truck.

            At once, three white flashes light up the buildings, and Tomoyo doesn’t know where her screaming starts and where the great thunder of three detonated bombs begins.

            Maybe this is how it ends, though.

            Maybe.

 

            Kurogane sees Tomoyo return. She acts differently. She watches him with eyes slightly more vigilant than before—gone is the cheerful yet wry glance of her eyes. She watches him. He wonders just how much she knows. Kendappa is no help, naturally, and the sisters grow closer than Kurogane thinks possible. Plotting, he thinks. He doesn’t know.

            He has taken to scrubbing at the carpet again. She visits, but tells him nothing substantial. He asks where she was, and Tomoyo shrugs, leaving her shoes by the door. She settles into an uncomfortable chair, musing, “You stole my vodka.”

            “Your sister seemed pretty sure you died. I thought it should go to some use, at least,” Kurogane mutters. Tomoyo answers that with a joyless chuckle. He puts down his comb, tucking it in his back pocket, and stands at his full height.

            Different. Somehow, she is different. Tired. But there are no bruises, no missing teeth, no sunken cheeks—she is fine. She shakes her head.

            “I’m fine, Kurogane,” she says. “I just wonder about you.”

            “Nothing to wonder about.”

            “You’re never going to get the sand out of the carpets, you know,” she tells him. He frowns. “What have you been up to?”

            “Tomoyo,” Kurogane mutters, “are you really gonna keep ignoring my question?”

            She smiles.

            “Where _were_ you?” Kurogane asks.

            “Places. Busy. Real busy,” Tomoyo replies. Bullshit answer. They both know it’s a bullshit answer. Kurogane rolls his eyes. “If I didn’t make it obvious enough, I can’t exactly tell you.”

            “ _Why_?”

            “Because you’re….you, Kurogane,” Tomoyo says.

            “The hell does that mean?”

            She shakes her head.

            “What did you _do_?” Kurogane insists. “I keep hearing about…”

            “Stop,” Tomoyo commands, and Kurogane glares. Suspicious. Bullshit answers. Something is wrong, but she won’t say what, and he is nervous. What does she know? What has she learned? He won’t give her the opportunity. But she isn’t giving him any, either. Her smile is absent.

            He considers what to say.

            “Really,” Tomoyo sighs, “I’m fine. Everything’s fine. But are you?”

            Kurogane gives her no answer. He resumes combing the carpet, silent until she leaves. And she does, but it takes a while. She sits in that place with an expression like there are words she has, words she isn’t allowed, and he combs sand from the carpet. She’s right. It will never be clean. He can never make it feel clean, but that is how he feels, too. Dirty and downtrodden and surrounded by sand and he hopes he never sees sand again.

            When she leaves, he finds a note in her wake, and after he reads it, he puts it in a little cigar box—where the rest of his magical childhood treasures have gone. Perhaps this, too, is magic. He doesn’t know. Magic is gone, now, and it might never come back.

            But he hopes, somehow, that it might.

 

            In the market, Sakura is confused by the list of things Kurogane has requested. Fluorescent white lights and security cameras will remember their faces, but Sakura doesn’t know that, yet. Syaoran, too, is confused. His basket is full of peppers and sauces and Sakura’s is full—well, not that. Not that. He blinks at her basket, brows raised. Sakura smiles uneasily. Nearby, a child and his mother are arguing about whether or not to purchase a sugar-filled cereal. It seems far away and different to Sakura. She is no longer concerned with cereal. Syaoran, standing with his puzzled expression.

            “What is that?” he asks.

            “I’m not sure,” she confesses. She’s tucked the dragon picture away. “I just thought we might need them.”

            Syaoran grimaces. “Sakura…”

            “I just—Syaoran, it’s fine,” she decides. “It’s fine.”

            “Why are we buying those things?”

            “I’ll buy them. For me.”

            “Sakura, is it—”

            “I’m buying them.”

            But in the evening, she brings the things back and has an awful feeling in her belly, a feeling like she is doing something difficult and bad and she doesn’t know exactly what. She brings the dragon picture back out after Syaoran has fallen asleep and hovers by her window. Their room is slightly better than the ones the refugees have—she’s seen that—and they are allowed more privacy. They have a shower, a bathtub, a fully equipped kitchen, a dining room, furniture—frankly, it’s better than the house they had before this, even if the situation is worse.

            Syaoran is asleep at his desk, cheek stuck to an essay written in pencil. It’s useless for Syaoran’s students. They’re older; they recognize the futility in their education, now that World War III is raging overseas. For Sakura, the education still matters. For Sakura, it’s different. She knows this.

            She flips open her laptop. When she enters the ingredients she’s bought, she is horrified, but—Kurogane, his dead parents—she wants to make a difference. She wants someone to have hope. She quickly deletes her internet history and packs her market finds in a backpack, one she will give to Kurogane Suwa.

            She wants this world to be better.

            She hopes that desire doesn’t kill her.

            (It might.)

 

            The hole is deep enough. Kurogane passes the backpack under it, and Fai holds it close to his face, fingering through the items. He zips it back up and smiles at Kurogane. He can fit through the hole, now, but Kurogane can’t. Kurogane is still too large. (It’s his bone structure; he’s big-boned.) Fai murmurs, “That Sakura is a good lady, isn’t she?”

            “Yep.”

            Fai hoists the backpack on his shoulders, muttering something cheerfully about feeling like a school boy again. Kurogane studies him for a bit. Fai is lean, pale, lanky, blond, and very human. The more he encounters Fai, the more he likes him. Fai reminds Kurogane of being a boy, of living in a time when there was more magic in the world, when there was magic even in the things that he can’t see as magic, now. That is Fai. Magic. Fai smiles at him, curious.

            “What is it?” he wonders.

            “Nothing,” Kurogane replies. Too quickly. They both know it. Fai does not press it; he is kind enough to leave it be. “Tomoyo left me a letter. You were right.”

            “Oh?”

            Kurogane retrieves the note from his pocket, frowning at it. Tomoyo, the Japanese-American and _something else,_ but he doesn’t know what; she won’t say _._ Tomoyo, the seer, too. All of it. His eyes peel over the note. A confession, almost, but not the type he wants. A letter about friendship and loyalty and a request for Kurogane to keep his eye out for ‘anything suspicious’. He grimaces, tucks it away.

            “Something is up with her,” Kurogane grunts.

            “Ah?” Fai murmurs. “What do we think of that?”

            “ _We_?”

            Fai smiles, making a vague gesture between them. “ _We_.”

            “Well, _I_ think she’s a mole, but I don’t know what _we_ think.”

            Fai hums, brows raised, interested. “A mole?”

            “I don’t know. Something like that.”

            “Oh?” Fai smiles. “How curious.”

            “You understand I don’t mean a literal _mole,_ right? I’m not talking about—”

            “ _Kurogane_.” (Fai’s favorite warning, one that means _I’m not an idiot_. Kurogane never knew his name could mean so many things.)

            “Guess so,” Kurogane decides. Fai looks bemused. “You were right, but don’t say ‘I told you so’.”

            “I told you so.”

            “Asshole.”

            “What do we think of that, then?” Fai asks. “Tomoyo Daidouji, the mole…”

            “It’s her life. It isn’t mine. She makes her own choices. It’s not my place to judge.” Kurogane shrugs. Fai fiddles with his hair, glancing off as if he’s caught in thought. But Fai looks that way often. Kurogane doesn’t know what to make of it. “What is it?”

            “I wonder what you think of the entire concept of spying,” Fai decides. “What do you think of it? I am curious.”

            “Hell do I care?” is Kurogane’s answer.

            “If she is a spy, would you still be her friend?”

            Kurogane purses his lips. Fai flashes a quick smile.

            “Sure,” Kurogane grumbles. “Got nothing to do with me, anyway. So long as I’m not in trouble, why should I care? I have no secrets.”

            “But you do, Kurogane.”

            “Nope.”

            “Batman?”

            Kurogane hears a guard walking. He slips his hand through the hole, and Fai takes it, and Kurogane considers his words. He must be fast. He manages a smile.

            “Tomorrow night,” he whispers. “Okay?”

            Fai nods.

            Again, they drift off.

 

            “Doumeki,” Kurogane tells Tomoyo. He takes a seat beside her at the children’s soccer championship. Sakura and Syaoran are sitting very far back in the crowd, hoping that their presence won’t distract the kids. Kendappa sits silently by Tomoyo, ignoring Kurogane. The younger sister’s gaze drifts towards the sidelines to Doumeki, who stands with arms folded in a crinkly varsity jacket. It is slightly awkward, as he is the coach of both ‘teams’, but he does well enough. The children will all be rewarded, regardless of which team wins. So far, the red-shirt team looks more promising. The blue-shirt team’s goalie cackles and screams whenever the ball shoots near her; she keeps launching to the side of the net, giggling, as the red-shirts get a goal.

            Tomoyo smiles. “Why?”

            “He’s suspicious,” Kurogane mutters. “When you were…wherever you were, I tried talking to him. He blew me off like he had something against me. Asking about prison and all that.”

            “Kurogane,” Tomoyo laughs, “you _are_ infamous, or did you not notice that the people around us have suddenly given us a lot of room?”

            “People are idiots.”

            She’s right. The second Kurogane wiggled through the shoddy bleachers, the other interned prisoners drew back from him. Now, he has a good three feet empty beside him. Stupid. He won’t attack them. He has no anger for _them._ Kurogane shakes his head, and Tomoyo smiles.

            “Doumeki,” she says, like she’s tasting the name. “No. I don’t think it’s him. It’s not that unusual if he’s rude to you.”

            “He was _more_ than rude.”

            “And?”

            “He _really_ didn’t wanna talk to me.”

            “I’m not seeing your point,” Tomoyo murmurs. Around them, a sudden eruption of cheers, and they break out of conversation. She sits up straighter. “ _Oh—_ hey, the blue-shirts got a goal!”

            She makes the odd whooping noise with everyone else. Kurogane pointedly refrains; all Kendappa does, in reaction, is glance up from her notebook with mild interest before diving straight back into writing. Tomoyo turns towards him, grinning until he surrenders something like a smile. She pats him on the back.

            “Look,” she mutters, “you can’t read into it with Doumeki. He’s that way with everyone, even me.”

            “You?”

            “Look at him,” she says, gesturing to the coach. “I think he’s a lot like you, just more… _inward._ Anti-social. Loner. Not especially personable. _But_ , unlike you, he’s quiet about it.”

            “Didn’t know you thought so highly of me.”

            Tomoyo grins.

            “I still think he’s suspicious,” Kurogane insists.

            “Maybe,” she decides, “but I don’t think he’s that remarkably suspicious. He gets along with the kids, the parents mostly like him, and he does have friends.”

            “ _Really_?”

            “The chef,” she says, pointing towards an irritable man in front of them. Black hair. Glasses. Kurogane has met the guy a few times. “Honestly, it feels like there is someone right under my nose, yet I’m not seeing it.”

            Kendappa’s pencil lead snaps, and the look she gives it is horrible enough that Kurogane looks away, eyes going towards the field.

            A kid in a blue shirt runs up to Doumeki; Doumeki hands the boy a water bottle and gives him a sterile pat on the head, and the boy grins enormously before handing the bottle back. Doumeki twists the cap half-way and hands it over, watching the kid open it and shout triumphantly for his mother in the crowd, waving the bottle in the air. Water goes everywhere. Doumeki shakes his head.

            “I’ll keep an eye out for him, though,” Tomoyo decides. “Thank you, Kurogane.”

           

            Kurogane is twenty-one years old. He will finish his degree soon, but not soon enough. He tracks developments of public perceptions of police, of police gone sour, of police gone good, of everything he values. He believes in justice, still, even if the world shows him that justice isn’t served in ways he expects. Around his college, the destitute cling to their homes, knowing his university will steal this from them. Sometimes, he stands there, watching them. There are protests regularly. Some of his peers laugh at it. Some are pleased that the rundown houses will become gardens. Kurogane doesn’t know what he thinks, exactly, but he senses that it isn’t justice.

            In a cigar box of memories he has in his apartment, the plastic sheriff badge feels cheap across his fingers. Kurogane thinks that justice is now what he thought it was, as a kid. It isn’t the good guy grabbing the bad guy; it isn’t clear, black and white. It isn’t the flying superhero returning a stolen purse to a kindly old lady. It isn’t the firefighter rescuing a frantic kitten from a tree. It’s a grey area. Ideals are, though. Grey.

            He rolls the badge across both palms. There was black paint on it, once, that said _sheriff._ The badge is so old that it only reads _if_ now, rubbed away from his hands over the years.

            He takes out a letter from a Russian child. When he looks up the name on social media, he can’t find anything. It doesn’t matter. He’s older, now; that childhood dream is gone. But he still has justice. He can make justice happen, even if it happens in ways he couldn’t fathom as a kid. He has that, right?

            In three years, he will stop believing in it. But he doesn’t know that, yet. He doesn’t. He refolds the letter, tucking it back in, and the _if_ badge follows.

 

            Kurogane goes to the fence and no one meets him. No Fai. He waits for a little while, looking into the dark, but no one joins him. Fai is supposed to be here; he looks forward to seeing the Russian, and yet—no one. He is alone.

            _Something_ —

            He looks up at the sky, but there are no stars. There is only blackness. Kurogane’s mind whirs about, considering things. Fai likes teasing him, likes trying to coax out information. Fai likes bringing him food. Fai wants to see a tornado. Fai wants to see a sandstorm.

            _Something is_ —

            He looks into the compound, into the night of everything. This isn’t how his future was supposed to be. He was going to be a police officer. He was never supposed to end up in a place like this, cut off from the future, cut off from hope. He was going to protect people. He was going to find justice. He was going to repaint that _if_ badge into _sheriff_ and make childhood dreams take new form. But this country has taken him; this country, xenophobic and paranoid, has pushed him into the remote desert. Will he die here? He shouldn’t. He was never supposed to be in a place like this.

            _Something is wrong._

            Fai never shows.

 

            “This again?” Tomoyo wonders. She likes to come right in, apparently, without notice. Kurogane is on his hands and knees, combing the carpet. The letters on the wall flutter from a gust of desert air until Kurogane snaps at Tomoyo and she closes it. She takes off her coat, whistling as she looks at him. “What’s going on?”

            “Why don’t _you_ fucking tell me?” Kurogane hisses.

            “Alright, from zero to ten right away,” Tomoyo decides. “Not good.”

            “No. _Not good_ ,” Kurogane snarls. His fingers hurt. His wrists have been strained, painful, but he can’t stop cleaning. If he stops cleaning—if he stops—he doesn’t know, he doesn’t know. But he can’t stop. If he does—he doesn’t know. Tomoyo is watching him, peeling off sandy gloves, forcing more sand and filth in his adopted home. Clean. He wants to be clean and perfect. Tomoyo is dirty.

            “Kurogane,” Tomoyo starts, and she has that gentle, curious tone people have when they’re confronted with something unfixable.

            “ _What_?”

            “You missed lunch.”

            “You’re right—really missed out on undercooked rice,” Kurogane returns. “What a travesty.”

            “How long have you been…”

            “What, Tomoyo? What do you want?”

            She steps towards him.

            “Take off your damn _shoes_ ,” he reminds her. She stands very still, sighs, and finally obliges him. She leaves her shoes by the door. Dirty. He wants to be clean. She’s going to taint this place, and then—then, maybe—he doesn’t know.

            “Kurogane,” she says, clearing her throat, “you gotta stop.”

            “Nope.”

            “You have blisters on your hands.”

            Kurogane glances at them; he does. He doesn’t remember seeing them before. No matter. He keeps combing. Tomoyo gingerly plants herself down, and he is almost disappointed that he has to look her in the eye. It’s easy to be angry, to rage, when he doesn’t have to _look_ at someone. She looks small, too, with sand in her dark hair. Some offer in her face. He isn’t sure what it means.

            “What’s wrong?” she asks.

            “Take your pick,” he says, but it doesn’t come out as nastily as he wants. She frowns at him, sympathetic, eyes whirring back and forth.

            “Fai?” she asks.

            “He wasn’t there,” Kurogane blurts out, and he wishes he could shut his mouth, but he can’t. Fai wasn’t there. “I waited. He wasn’t there. He’s always there. He was supposed to be. He wasn’t.”

            Tomoyo considers this, holding a hand over the collar of her shirt. She rubs at something there, pale-faced.

            “Kurogane, all this cleaning won’t bring him back,” she reminds him. “You’re making yourself neurotic.”

            “This is the only shit I _can_ do,” Kurogane returns.

            “You’re scared.”

            “No.”

            “Well, I am,” Tomoyo tells him. “I’m not ashamed of that. I’m scared.”

            Kurogane hesitates on an answer.

            “I know you’re scared, too,” Tomoyo says. He can’t say it, himself, so he lets her do it for him. He stares at the carpet. So much sand. Tiny, tiny grains of it, wrapped in bland fibers, taunting him. Reminders of things he cannot change, cannot fix. If he doesn’t look at her, he can keep it together—he tells himself this, focusing on the sand. “Look—we’re in an awful situation. You lost your parents. We’ve both been pulled right out of the real world and stuck in here like…”

            “Prisoners,” Kurogane supplies.

            “Prisoners,” Tomoyo agrees. “It’s normal to be scared. I’m terrified. Honestly, Kurogane—I’m terrified.”

            He says nothing.

            “I don’t have a lot, here,” Tomoyo confesses. “I’m around people I don’t know I can trust. I know I can trust you. I’ve seen that. And you don’t trust me—it’s okay. I understand. I’m not happy about it, sure, but I get it. But we’re both here. It’s shitty, and I don’t know what to do.”

            “Escape,” Kurogane says, but it comes out in a wobbly croak.

            Tomoyo reaches out, gently touching a blistered hand. Kurogane can’t look at her. He can’t. He lets her take the comb from his hand, tossing across the room, and lets her hold his hand in hers. She has soft, tiny fingers. He is suddenly aware of how badly his hands hurt. His eyes sting.

            “I don’t think we can,” she whispers. “I’m sorry.”

            In the room, someone sobs, and he isn’t sure if it’s him.

 

            Fai is still gone. Kurogane takes to walking by the fence during the day, staring through it, watching for any flash of yellow hair. He sees some, but it doesn’t belong to the person he wants to see. He doesn’t linger long, though, worried that someone might notice what he’s doing, so he takes walks around when he can. He glances towards the fence, searching for someone, but that someone isn’t there.

            He is keeping a tally of the people he’s lost and praying that it stays at _two_.

            Kurogane meets with Sakura again, and he isn’t even sure why he does it. Something about her is kind. Something about her feels like healing. Syaoran is confused and uneasy with Kurogane’s presence in the room, watching with nervous eyes. Sakura gives him warm smiles, anyway, and she wraps up his hands in children’s band-aids. Pink, flowered—they match her. They look silly on him. Still, he accepts her gift.

            “The tournament is going well,” Sakura tells him. “I heard talk that they might have games for different camps—for the Russians and us and…” She trails off, shrugging. “I thought you might want to hear.”

            Kurogane asks, trying for ‘casual’, “You know any Russians?”

            “I know the teachers, there,” Sakura confesses. “Not much more, though. I heard the chef was in some trouble for under-cooking meat…”

            Kurogane goes on full alert. “Oh?”

            Sakura nods. Lowering her voice, she adds, “They don’t like him, there. All he can cook are pastries. He’s supposed to be a world-renowned chef, but he isn’t doing a good job, according to the other cooks. The other teachers keep me updated.”

            Kurogane glances at Syaoran, who is still determined to finish his lesson for the teenagers yet can’t stop himself from looking in their direction. Kurogane swallows.

            “How many people know that I…”

            “Mr. Suwa,” Sakura murmurs, “it isn’t something everyone knows. I only know because I’ve spoken to Tomoyo. She worries about you.”

            Kurogane doesn’t know how to answer that. He feels very naked. Tomoyo has thrown his secrets out to a woman named after a flower.

            Then—

            “Doumeki,” he breathes.

            “I don’t know,” she confesses. “He seems to know a great deal, but he doesn’t say much. I just…worry for you.”

            “Why?”

            “I know what those purchases were for,” she whispers, and she is grabbing another piece of paper, and in her haste to grab a crayon, she knocks over a cup full of them. Kurogane moves to set them back in place, skin crawling from the thought of a mess. She knows what the purchases were for. He should be in terrible trouble, he realizes, and he is afraid because he is not.

            There must be a catch. There is always a catch.

            “I—”

            “I don’t want to hurt others,” Sakura says so quietly that it almost sounds like a wordless breath. She holds a salmon pink crayon in a nervous hand, starting to draw. Kurogane can see her art, this time. Flowers. Again. “I know you want to get out. I understand. But please— _please_ —will someone get hurt?”

            Kurogane doesn’t know how to answer. Sakura looks away, draws with too much force, and the crayon snaps in two. Kurogane hands her another crayon while she looks at the fragments, dismayed.

            “If they know,” Sakura confesses, “I will be in trouble, too. I didn’t know when I bought those things. I didn’t. Syaoran is important to me. These children are. Please, Mr. Suwa—give me a way to keep everyone safe through this, because what you’re planning is not safe.”

            Kurogane takes a black crayon from the cup. He etches Hiragana characters that are upside down to the teacher. She swallows, watching with a pensive face, lips pursed.

            “The Russian,” Kurogane mumbles. “His name is Fai. He’s nice. Friendly. That’s the cook. What happened?”

            She lowers her eyes.

            “Is he _alive_?”

            “Mr. Suwa!” Syaoran greets, crossing the room, and Kurogane jumps at the sound his own name. He turns. He thinks that people smile at things like this, and he thinks he is trying to smile, but isn’t sure if it’s working. Syaoran’s uneasy expression is not comforting, anyway; he extends an odd hand, and Kurogane decides to take it. He doesn’t want Syaoran to have the wrong idea about him and Sakura, after all. “What brings you in, today?”

            Kurogane doesn’t know what to say, but Sakura rescues him. She is good at this sort of thing.

            “Mr. Suwa was worried about the team,” Sakura announces, and she sounds warm and sweet and casual. “He really wants to replace Doumeki.”

            “Doumeki can’t draw a dragon,” Kurogane insists.

            “It was a wonderful dragon,” Syaoran assures him.

            Sakura stands from the table, coming towards her husband with nothing but love in her face. Kurogane wonders about love like that. He wonders if he will ever have one, himself. Syaoran relaxes with her, visibly, as he doesn’t relax around anyone else. Kurogane glances at his hands—a flash of pink and vibrant band-aids—and stands from the too-short, uncomfortable chair. Sakura and Syaoran smile at him, children, despite being his elders.

            “At least he is alive,” Sakura says, meaningfully, looking Kurogane intently in the eyes. She finishes with a laugh, and Syaoran laughs, too, though he has no idea what she means; he must assume some secret joke has been exchanged.

            “Yep,” Kurogane says. “Alive in prison, right?”

            He thinks he’s laughing, too. He doesn’t know. But Sakura is laughing, nodding. There are many conversations happening at once, but he knows exactly which one he is really having with Sakura. Fai is alive. Fai is alive in prison. He is grateful for her. In another life, he thinks, they could have been real friends.

            He only has this life, though. He extends his hand towards them, again.

            “It was good to see you,” he says.

            “It was,” Sakura confirms warmly. “It is always good to see you, Mr. Suwa.”

            If she’s lying, too—well, no one will say.

 

            The war is not progressing.

            The Allied troops are retreating.

            Everyone wants war to end, but it is never so simple. The death toll is soaring. The cold freezes civilians and soldiers and the neighboring countries of Russia shrink back, afraid that their location alone will leave them vulnerable. They’re right. The retreated troops draw back there, frozen and bitter and frightened.

            A Russian woman picks up the pieces of a shattered drone, wondering how the world has come to this. Her sons, dressed in coats that do not fit—they are meant for adult men, men who are cynical enough to survive this place—try to pick up other pieces, but she snaps at them, so they don’t. They draw back.

            A British medic is shaking a man he considered a brother not even a day ago, as if passion alone might bring the dead back to life. It doesn’t. The man is still dead. The medic screams at him, still, because that is all he can do when modern medicine offers no other solutions.

            A hotel is Syria is bombed. Another one is bombed. No one knows the names of these victims across the world except for their families. The loss is counted amongst war victims, but the families wonder which war these losses will be counted upon. History will decide, but it is an unreasonable thing, to wait for history to decide the reality of things. A Syrian woman, a Sunni, begins to write a memoir, deciding that her truth should survive somewhere, even if no one should read it.

            The war will last six years in total.

            It still rages by the time an isolated internment camp in Arizona faces a deadly bombing that kills nearly fifty people.

 

            When Fai returns, Kurogane sees him in the daylight, walking with an arm linked in Tomoyo’s. She has humored him, going on these walks with him, while knowing fully well what he’s trying to do. She has a reserve on her face that he can’t quite read, as if she’s resigned herself to something. He doesn’t know. All he knows is that he stops walking when he sees a flash of yellow hair and a face he’s been wanting to see.

            He stops walking, heart jolting and some heat flooding his face. Tomoyo keeps going ahead for a moment, making a small noise of surprise until she stops walking, as well. She looks through the fence, too, and the queer moment passes. Fai, with a black eye and a cigarette, blinking at the both of them. At a glance, Kurogane sees Tomoyo’s face go tense and firm, but—Fai, alive, with a black eye. And Kurogane’s heart is moving, moving, moving.

            He considers going forward. He wants to. He wants to go to the fence and yell at him for worrying him, but he can’t. He clears his throat, trying to say as much as he can through a look alone. Fai offers him a brief smile in reply: _I’m fine._ Kurogane looks away from the Russian and walks forward, pretending nothing out of the ordinary has passed.

            The guards have hurt his friend, he thinks. He is angry for it. But he is relieved that Fai walks free. Tomoyo’s grip on his arm goes tighter. They’re going towards the soccer field—a barren plain of sand and brush. Kurogane is afraid to speak, at first, so Tomoyo talks. She is always that way. She is the first to broach uncomfortable things, the first to break painful moments.

            “Your boyfriend is out,” she says.

            “Not my boyfriend.”

            “I don’t know, Kurogane—I don’t think you’d give a platonic _buddy_ a look like that,” she sighs. She pokes his cheek. “Look, you’re…”

            “He has a shiner,” Kurogane interrupts.

            “He’s okay, alright?” she returns. “We saw him. Alive. Walking around. You can have your date and catch up later. How do you feel?”

            Kurogane makes a vague gesture with his free hand. Tomoyo laughs.

            “That’s how I felt, you know,” she says, “when they took you off.”

            “It’s pretty awful.”

            “Yep, and you did that _twice_.”

            Kurogane glances at her. She’s still smiling, but the expression doesn’t seem right. He thinks about what the right thing to say might be, so he says it: “I’m sorry.”

            “It’s alright,” Tomoyo replies. “No hard feelings. But you can be an idiot, sometimes.”

            “Oh, shut up.”

            She grins.

 

            Tomoyo is sitting in a room with one-way mirrors yet again, giving out names to people she thinks are innocent, but perhaps suspicious enough to keep the government distracted. Oz has Doumeki’s records right in front of him as well as Watanuki Kimihiro’s—one of the chefs for her compound. He frowns, glancing through them.

            “They have no other language specialization,” Oz observes. “Not looking promising.”

            “They _are_ suspicious,” Tomoyo insists. “They meet all the time. I’ve followed them to see, but I can never get close enough to hear anything.”

            “Your feed always picks up static,” Oz confirms.

            “Doumeki is the one I’m concerned about,” Tomoyo continues. “He barely talks to anyone, but he knows everyone’s business. Or, at least, it _seems_ like…”

            “You really don’t want this wine, do you?” Oz asks.

            “I really do. Believe me.”

            “You’re not acting like it.” Oz shakes his head, puts the files aside. “No language specializations. No connections to anything. Neither went to college. Neither of them had _any_ networking opportunities. Honestly, I’m wondering if you _want_ to go to prison.”

            Tomoyo glares at that. He knows it isn’t true, but he still shrugs at her, green eyes blaring bright. She sits back in her seat, jutting out her chin. She can only afford some small forms of defiance, now.

            “I’m actually very surprised you haven’t talked about Fai Fluorite,” Oz says.

            “He isn’t in my camp,” Tomoyo retorts. “You said the threat was from _my_ camp.”

            “I’m just surprised you haven’t said anything,” Oz continues, “considering what you know.”

            She shrugs. “Not my camp.”

            “I don’t _want_ you to go to prison,” Oz reminds her, frowning. “I’m trying to help you. What else do you know?”

            “Russian guy. Likes sweets,” Tomoyo replies blandly. “Chef. What else is there to know?”

            “I think you know more than you’re letting on,” Oz tells her, and they both know it’s true, but Tomoyo only smiles at that. She can pretend not to know much more, but—the smile falls. She folds her hands on the table. She thinks. If she says what she suspects, she might be able to save some lives—but if she says too much, she is condemning Kurogane.

            There is no correct answer.

            “Look,” she says, “I know something is off with the guy.”

            Oz leans in closer. She sighs, looks at her hands.

            “I never knew him before this,” she tells him. “I can’t say I know what he’s up to, but I think there is something wrong with him. I might suggest that he isn’t an honest man.”

            “I thought the same,” Oz confirms, nodding. “He passes the lie detectors, but they’re shit for figuring out these things, anyway. According to his camp, he really can’t cook anything but cookies. He’s a five star chef. What kind of five star chef only makes cookies?”

            Tomoyo smiles. “Not a five star chef, I’d say.”

            “It’s aggravating. We can’t put him away for nothing, and that’s all we have—nothing,” Oz complains. “You don’t have any leads, and my leads aren’t looking good, either. Are you _sure_ you don’t know anything else?”

            Tomoyo considers herself.

            “I wish I did,” she confesses. (She does.)

 

            She has a dream about fire and blood and soot and screaming and when she wakes up, Tomoyo screams into her pillows over the unfairness of it all, the unfairness of futures she cannot divert, the corpses wheeled out of this place, her parents driving in the rain at night, the boy who fell from a tree, the man who rinsed pepper spray out of a woman’s eyes, the military boy who caught her, the cats she misses, the roommate who cried upon seeing her, the girl Tomoyo broke her arm for twice, the chef Tomoyo conned into giving her alcohol, the fire— _the fire._

            Tomoyo understands why Kurogane combs sand out of carpets. It makes him feel less helpless. It gives him a sense of control. It creates the illusion that he has power over some part of his life. It’s an illusion, but a good one. Tomoyo gets out of bed, desperate and sad, tearing her useless laptop off the table—useless because she has no wifi, useless because she is trapped—and kicks it across the carpet. She sweeps bitter arms across the table, shoving everything off it. A ball of red yarn, a folder, a hard-cover book, a salt-shaker shaped like a cat, a hairbrush, a sweater, thread, a marker—everything red. Everything she had done to pick up the attention of Russian planes or satellites overhead. It was her _danger_ message. It was her _rescue_ message. And no one has seen it. That was the deal of her treachery—she agreed to it because it was promised, always, that she had a way out.

            There might not be a way out, now, she realizes.

            She is going to die here. She is going to die here, and she can’t control it, but she can control this. She can break things. Kurogane cleans; Tomoyo ruins. She sinks onto the carpet, surrounded by the mess. The laptop’s screen is cracked. The salt-shaker is shattered, scattering salt in the carpet like so much sand. The yarn ball has rolled out, rolled towards her sister’s bed.

            “Ken?” she asks, but there is no answer.

            Tomoyo gets to her feet, staggering towards the cot. It looks like someone’s there. She _knows_ she made enough noise to wake up Kendappa. The Daidoujis have never been light sleepers.

            “ _Ken_?” she repeats. “C’mon.”

            She touches the lump beneath the covers, but it isn’t solid. It isn’t warm. Tomoyo swallows, drawing the sheets back in a quick movement, and finds herself looking at a pile of clothes and pillows. A trick. Her sister isn’t here.

            Something lurches in her gut. Intuition. She doesn’t want to trust it.

            “Aw, shit,” Tomoyo whispers.

 

            At the fence, Kurogane reminds himself of self-restraint. Fai is already there, waiting, some patient look on his face. When Kurogane approaches, Fai waves. Again, Kurogane feels his heart moving. Embarrassing, he thinks—embarrassing because, really, this is a crush. This is a _crush._ They’re stuck in a prison in the desert and Kurogane has a goddamn crush.

            He wonders what his parents would think of this.

            “Good evening,” Fai greets. “Sorry to worry you.”

            Stupid, useless crush. Kurogane could slap himself. But he’s smiling, instead, like an idiot. He’s had crushes before, anyway, rare as they were, and he can think himself out of this. He mutters, “What happened?”

            “Oh, Kurogane,” Fai sighs, “I made trouble for myself. That is all.”

            “Sakura said you undercooked meat for your camp.”

            Fai shrugs. “People are hard to please.”

            “Kendappa didn’t like your cookies.”

            “That is her opinion, Kurogane, and she is not a nice lady.”

            “Apparently, Fai, you’re a world-renowned chef,” Kurogane adds. This is good. His heart is getting the message, slowing down. His brain is taking the reigns. Fai’s smile remains perfect on his face, somehow. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

            “Kurogane,” Fai scolds, “I just survived _one_ interrogation.” He points to the black eye. “I would rather not sit through another.”

            “You _will_ tell me.”

            “You do not tell me plenty of things,” Fai returns. “You start going on about Batman when I try. For instance, if I ask about your sexuality…”

            “Batman is my favorite superhero,” Kurogane interrupts immediately. “I understand there are things people don’t like about him, but his lack of actual superpowers is what I find so interesting. He might not have been able to do it without all the wealth, sure, but—”

            “Look at this,” Fai complains, gesturing at a nonexistent audience. “He is doing it again. All it takes is one word. Incredible.”

            “Really, I think he would have found a way to justice, even if he wasn’t wealthy,” Kurogane insists. “Other superheroes have done it.”

            “Kurogane, be serious.” Fai smiles at him.

            “I’m serious, though.”

            “I don’t want to discuss the Batman again,” Fai says. “I was proving a point, and you did nothing to disprove it. Still, it’s very cute that you’re so passionate about it.”

            “Not the descriptor I was hoping for.”

            “It is _enormously_ cute,” Fai corrects.

            “Nope.”

            “Well,” Fai huffs, “I tried.”

            They smile at each other, having reached some sort of stalemate. Neither looks away. Fai nods downward, and Kurogane realizes he is offering his hands under the fence, through the hole they’ve built together. Kurogane hesitates, but gives his hands over. Band-aids and all. Fai makes a small, bemused noise.

            “I was only gone for three days,” Fai murmurs, “and look what you managed to do.”

            “I was cleaning.”

            “You must be _vigorously_ neat, yes?”

            Kurogane draws his hands away. “Black eye. Explain it.”

            “There is not much to explain, Kurogane. I misbehaved and paid the consequence for it.” Fai touches the swollen eye, contemplative. “I should think it is like a wound on the face of justice, too. What would your Batman do about it?”

            “Get justice.”

            “And what would _you_ do, Kurogane?”

            “The same.”

            Fai smiles gently, nodding. “We will have justice. We will have our freedom. That has not changed.”

            “The date is the same, then?”

            “Yes,” Fai replies, nodding. “I have made the arrangements. There is nothing you need to do on your part but crawl through at the correct time.”

            “Sakura figured it out.”

            The smile leaves Fai’s face instantly.

            “She just wanted to know how to protect herself and the others,” Kurogane explains. “I told her to go to the rec center, have a movie night—just something to keep everyone in one spot. She… She knows if she speaks up, she’ll be in trouble, too, so she won’t.”

            Fai still doesn’t smile. “Smart girl.”

            “People are going to die, aren’t they?”

            “People die all the time, Kurogane,” Fai replies. “There are always casualties. Think of a space heater in the cold—warming, comforting, heat amidst the brutal winter. That warmth kills hundreds a year. That warmth burns down thousands of houses. Even for the benign, there is a death toll.”

            Kurogane’s hands, covered in band-aids, and a teacher who wants to bring the children closer, to shield them from something awful. Kurogane knows it will be awful. He isn’t an idiot. He swallows.

            “You will never find the key code,” Fai adds. “This is a way that will not fail. I am only disappointed that I’ve yet to see a sandstorm. What is the point of a desert without a sandstorm?”

            Kurogane looks at the Russian, chest tight with guilt. People will die. The tally of people he lost will skyrocket, and he won’t even know their names. He thinks of Tomoyo. He wants to keep her safe, too, but he doesn’t know how. If she knew what he was a part of, what would she think?

            “What does a chef know about explosives, anyway?” Kurogane asks.

            “Enough,” Fai replies.

 

            It doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to. Kurogane is at the fence, slipping through the hole, when the first bomb goes off. He expects it. What he doesn’t expect is the giant, torn, hot grid of exploded fence that hits him in the arm. He screams with pain and surprise, shoved backwards. Blistering pain, heat—his body is screeching, and he thinks this is not what was supposed to happen. The blast was supposed to be far enough away that he could get through, unscathed.

            Kurogane clambers back to the fence, bellowing an inhuman sound when he tries forcing his left arm through. His forearm has bone sticking from it. He realizes he will need medical attention, which was not in the plan. None of this was in the plan. It _doesn’t go the way it’s supposed to._

            Someone’s pulling him through, grabbing his right arm. Strong, large hands with white fingers. Fai. Kurogane is swearing in different languages. He is lucid enough to shout, " _Don't lose my bag!_ " (He can't lose it. It has a cigar box full of memories and a sheriff badge and letters from a Russian boy he loved, once, and he can't lose it.)

            “I’m sorry, Kurogane,” Fai is shouting when the second bomb goes off, and Kurogane doesn’t remember much at all about that, then, because he passes out, lost to a dreamless place, where all his pain is imaginary.

            When he wakes, he will find it only too real.

 

            Kendappa picks Tomoyo up from the rubble of a crashed car, and her younger sister is dazed, shouting half-phrases that don’t make much sense. She grabs Kendappa’s arm like it’s the only steady thing in the world, and Kendappa uses her scarf to wipe the blood from her sister’s cheek. Tomoyo is wide-eyed, speaking loudly. Her ears weren’t protected from the blast. Unlike Tomoyo, Kendappa took that precaution, shielding her ears with noise cancellation headphones that took the brunt of it.

            Around them, sirens shriek a sound that feels like sharp stabs into the brain. Some spotlights have collapsed, heaving down onto buildings. Some barracks are split open from it; some have walls eaten out, blazing with fire. Four bombs have gone off, and Kendappa knows to expect more.

            “Ken _, it’s a fucking bomb!_ ” Tomoyo screams. She’s shaking. Kendappa has her sister by the shoulder, starting them towards the blasted open fence the explosions have made. An exit. Tomoyo is trying to walk, legs trembling, nose bleeding. She has glass splinters on her face that Kendappa will remove later.

            She might write about this. She isn’t sure.

            “ _Who set off a fucking bomb_?” Tomoyo demands.

            “I think you have an idea, Tomoyo,” Kendappa replies, but her sister cannot hear it.

            “ _Kurogane!_ ” Tomoyo hollers. “ _Kurogane!_ ”

            “No need to worry about your friend,” Kendappa tells her sister, but the reply goes unheard. Kendappa shakes her head. They are walking slowly past burning buildings, past bodies. A Russian woman’s head sits without a body by a house, the hair on fire. A Japanese man’s corpse lies limp on the ground, flaccid arms protecting his head in death. Kendappa thinks they are good images, ones she can use to pepper up a memoir.

            Tomoyo is weeping.

            “ _Oh God, oh God,_ ” Tomoyo sobs. She’s pointing, and Kendappa follows her sister’s eyes. A child, a boy. Kendappa remembers him; he ran into Tomoyo, once, and accidentally called her ‘mama’. Tomoyo tries to tear away, to go towards him, but Kendappa won’t let go. “ _Let go!_ ”

            “No.”

            “ _Ken_ _!_ ” Tomoyo barks. “ _Ken_ _!_ ”

            “I will not have you become a number,” Kendappa replies, raising her voice so that her sister might actually hear her. Tomoyo hits Kendappa in the face, and it’s enough of a surprise that Kendappa lets go. Instantly, Tomoyo’s bolting off, bolting towards the corpse.

            “ _No, no, no, no_ ,” Tomoyo’s spewing, voice hoarse and difficult. She’s grabbing the boy’s face in bloody, sandy sands. He’s missing an eye; the other one stares back, unresponsive. Tomoyo shakes and shakes and shakes. “ _Come on—come on_!”

            Kendappa grabs her sister back, prying her fingers from the body’s face. Tomoyo sobs like mad. He called her ‘mama’; both sisters remember it. Tomoyo’s eyes, wild and bloodshot and huge—

            Kendappa never wanted this for them. She always did her best to protect Tomoyo where Tomoyo wouldn’t protect herself (too often, too many situations, constantly—constantly, Tomoyo flinging herself away so that others escape unwounded). She learned how to let the future happen where Tomoyo couldn’t. So she has known, too, how to accept this future, blood and fire and death, because—

            “ _He’s a kid_ ,” Tomoyo sobs, almost hyperventilating. She’ll make herself pass out, but that might make this easier, Kendappa thinks. She nods, and Tomoyo grabs her sister by the coats. “ _Oh, God, Ken—oh my God._ ”

            Kendappa cradles her sister’s head.

            " _A kid, he's a kid_ ," Tomoyo is gasping, and her voice tapers off in a rough breath.

            Tomoyo hyperventilates so much that she passes out, and Kendappa is glad. Tomoyo slouches forward, and Kendappa flips up her sister's collar, finding the wire tucked beneath it; she removes it, tosses it to the ground. They should not have American ears spying on them any longer. She heaves her sister over her shoulder and takes a moment to look at the camp. A prison. A place she has known, always, that could not last. A place that bathes, now, in fire and screaming and corpses and innocent and guilty people. Fire does not discriminate. Kendappa shakes her head at it; she will not miss this place.

            Kendappa walks around burning buildings, stepping over limbs without bodies, listening to people scream for help, listening to fire scream over their voices. She walks a straight path, eyes on a gaping hole in the fence, listening to her sister’s breathing calm. At least Tomoyo’s pain is paused. It will return, but it is paused, for now.

            She steps over the fence and walks straight into freedom, into a dark desert.

            She leaves the camp.

            She walks towards the only road, there, and sees a black van waiting for her, exhaust joining the rest of the clouded air. Kendappa knocks on the window, and someone slides open the side door. She deposits her sister beside a man with a badly broken arm and shuts the door, herself, sitting in the passenger’s side. A dark-skinned woman with cropped, elegant hair smiles at her. Ameratsu nods, thankful.

            “Kendappa,” the woman says.

            “Souma,” Kendappa returns.

            Souma offers her right hand, and Kendappa takes it, kisses the back of it. Souma kisses the woman’s cheek and turns, looking into the back of the van. Kurogane is unconscious, his head in a Russian man’s lap; Tomoyo is curled up nearby him, glass stuck in her face, unconscious. Souma clicks her tongue, shakes her head.

            “You were late,” Kendappa accuses.

            “I’m on time,” Souma corrects her. “Our supervisor isn’t too pleased. We have a _civilian_ in the mix, now.”

            “Daddy won’t like this,” says a woman with blond hair, certainly not dressed for the cold—all she has is a long t-shirt on and a cigarette. Kendappa raises a brow. The woman doesn’t notice, too busy glaring at the blond-haired man beside her. “ _Yuui_.”

            “It could not be helped,” sighs the man.

            “What about your brother?” the blonde asks, and Yuui shrugs.

            “I will get to him eventually. They will figure it out, sooner or later, yes? Poor Fai. I really should have paid attention when he cooked.”

            “We need a hospital,” Kendappa realizes. Kurogane Suwa’s arm might need to be amputated, by the looks of it. Their supervisor will _not_ be pleased at all—but, at the very least, Kendappa will have valuable information for the Russians. After this, she thinks, she would like to drop off the grid. She would like to live in Venezuela, perhaps, with Souma. People don’t ask many questions, there.

            Souma sighs, switches into drive, and floors it. Kendappa glances out from tinted windows, having one last look at Hell aflame, and smiles.

            Tonight, the sky is full of stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU FOR STICKING THROUGH THIS! As it is, this is the end of this story. I may do a continuation in the future, but that would make this one a series. I am very grateful for your patience and attention throughout - this one took me a while to write, considering my current situation, but I am really happy that you have stuck with me. As always, please share your thoughts! I love to talk to you guys!

**Author's Note:**

> I'm posting previews for things ahead on [my tumblr!](http://a03-k-n.tumblr.com) Follow me for snippets and arts!
> 
> Copyright © 2016 by k_n


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